
Class. 
Book. 






Cofiyrightl^^- 



COnfRIGHT DEPOSIT 



EDUCATION IN A 
DEMOCRACY 

BY 

DALLAS LORE SHARP 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

tE^f)t 3Sii\}txsiUit ^xtsm Cambribse 

1922 



iC, 






COPYRIGHT, I919, 1920, AND I92I, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY 

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS 

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY HARPER & BROTHERS 

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY DALLAS LORE SHARP 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



/.Z6 



CAMBRIDGE • MASSACHUSETTS 
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 



OCT 13 '^2 

^C1A683653 



NOTE 

I wish to thank the Editors of the 
Atlantic particularly for allowing me to 
use in this book the chapter entitled 
" Education for Democracy/' which 
not only appeared first in the Atlantic^ 
but which was later reprinted in book 
form by the Atlantic Press under the 
title of " Patrons of Democracy." 



CONTENTS 

' I. The National School : i 

11. Education for Democracy 33 

III. Education for Individuality 84 

IV. Education for Authority 118 



EDUCATION IN A 
DEMOCRACY 



CHAPTER I 
THE NATIONAL SCHOOL 

I 

WE must sell the public school to the 
American people," said the speaker, as 
if the public school were somebody's 
chewing gum, or a yellow dog, or a new idea, 
and foreign to Americans. 

**We must sell the Stars and Stripes to the 
American people," he will say next, as if the flag 
were somebody's cheese cloth, or a mining stock, 
or a new idea out of Russia, 

\ "Hats off! 

Along the street there comes 

A blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums, 

A flash of color beneath the sky; 

Hats off! 

The flag is passing by!" 

Sell their flag to the American people? They 
have already bought it and paid for it with their 



2 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

blood. So, too, the American people have bought 
the American public school, and over it flung 
the American flag, and upon it, as the head of 
the corner, builded the American Nation. I 
never knew until yesterday that we have yet to 
sell (how I loathe the term !) the public school to 
the American public. 

The American public school is as truly na- 
tional as the American flag. It came into being 
before the flag. It is the earliest and outermost 
breastwork of American defense over which the 
flag flies. In 1647 (only twenty-seven years after 
the landing at Plymouth), Massachusetts Bay 
Colony passed a law ordering every town of 
fifty householders to provide a public school by 
public tax, if need be, for all the people; the law 
further ordering that every town of one hundred 
families should set up a grammar school in order 
to prepare students for the University, for Har- 
vard University, founded by the General Court 
in 1638, the original State University! Public 
education supported and supervised by the 
State was the original American educational 
programme. 

This act of 1647, embodying the principle of 



THE NATIONAL SCHOOL 3 

universal compulsory education in Massachu- 
setts, became the policy of the Nation when on 
the 13th of July, 1787, there was passed the 
** Ordinance for the Government of the Terri- 
tory of the United States Northwest of the River 
Ohio," wherein the Nation went on record, utter- 
ing its educational creed in the famous words: 
'* Religion, morality and knowledge being neces- 
sary to good government and the happiness of 
mankind, schools and the means of education 
shall forever be encouraged/* And the Nation 
backed this faith up with works in the shape of 
land grants — public lands set aside to sell and 
to lease for the purpose of maintaining the 
schools; these national land grants by the year 
1900, reaching the grand total of 86,138,433 
acres, an area as great as Prussia, as great as the 
siJt New England States with New York, New 
Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware added. This 
is an impressive figure and national in its appli- 
cation; just as the utterance explaining it was 
impressive and national in its bearing. Word 
and deed are ample proof of our national faith 
in the public school, and of our purpose to 
render it national support. And they are more 



4 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

than proof that from the beginning the true 
character of the American public school has been 
strictly a national character, though admin- 
istered by the separate States. 

But the public school is not only national, as 
national as the flag; it is also native, as native 
as the Mississippi River and these hills of Hing- 
ham. These hills indeed were brought here on 
the back of a glacier, whereas the American pub- 
lic school is indigenous. It was not brought from 
anywhere. It originated here to meet an utterly 
new educational need. 

Just so the famous Compact, signed in the 
cabin of the Mayflower that Saturday afternoon 
in November, 1620, originated here to meet an 
utterly new political need. And as the Compact 
stands to this time, and shall stand to all time, 
possibly, as the most daring and significant of 
political programmes, and the most American; 
so in the whole history of education, the law of 
1647 and the Ordinance of 1787 became the most 
revolutionary and significant of educational 
programmes, creating as they did the public 
school, the most truly native and American of 
all our national institutions. 



THE NATIONAL SCHOOL 5 

The forty-one men who signed the Compact 
in the cabin of the Mayflower had sailed under 
authority derived from the Virginia Company. 
But they had sailed beyond the reach of that 
authority when they crossed the forty-first de- 
gree, north latitude, and came into Plymouth 
Harbor. Finding themselves outside the juris- 
diction of a royal charter, those forty-one men 
compacted together for a new charter, *'In the 
name of God, Amen!*' — the first instance in 
human history where ordinary men, lacking 
royal and external authority, compact together 
and prove that from within they are capable of 
being their own authority. 

Not less daring'and momentous was the origin 
of universal and compulsory education in Amer- 
ica. Of the Act of 1647, requiring every Massa- 
chusetts town of fifty households to furnish free 
schools, Horace Mann said: *'It is impossible 
for us adequately to conceive the boldness of the 
measure which aimed at universal education 
through the establishment of free schools. As a 
fact it had no precedent in the world's history; 
and as a theory it could have been refuted and 
silenced by a more formidable array of argument 



6 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

and experience than was ever marshalled against 
any other institution of human origin." 

We forget this beginning of the public school, 
how strictly native and national it is — how in- 
stinct it is with the inmost soul of democracy. 
The public school is more than the intellectual 
expression of democracy; it is the hope, the 
strength, the beauty of democracy; its way, and 
truth, and life. 

Driven by the winds of destiny past the most 
arrogant parallel of royal power, the little May- 
flower came to anchor with her Compact at Plym- 
outh in a new human harbor, close in against a 
new political shore. The Pilgrims lived but a 
year under their Compact — it being but *'the 
first foundation of their government in this 
place," as Bradford says. ** First foundation" it 
was, nevertheless, and on that foundation has 
since been reared the whole structure of our 
Democracy. It was only twenty-seven years 
after the Compact was signed that the people of 
the Massachusetts Bay Colony, feeling out their 
new liberty and their new responsibility, created, 
in answer to both liberty and responsibility, 
their first native institution, the American pub- 



THE NATIONAL SCHOOL 7 

lie school, thus stamping forever the quality of 
American Democracy, and establishing forever 
the character and the business of the public 
school. 

How early they felt the true drift of their tide 
— that only universal intelligence and a com- 
mon grasp of the moral nature of Democracy 
would save them from the rocks ! That personal 
intelligence and a common moral conscience 
were an absolute need for the safety of a free 
people ! 

The Forty-One in the Mayflower could not 
realize fully the significance of their Compact. 
They were Englishmen, and they signed their 
revolutionary agreement in the name of God and 
also in the name of '*our soveragne lord King 
James, of England," which means that they 
brought to the new land their old name of King, 
and what they could of their old customs and 
institutions, using them so far as they applied 
to the new conditions. They lived but a year 
under their Mayflower Compact — only till the 
arrival of the Fortune bringing a new royal 
patent. But the ''first foundation" had been 
laid there in the cabin of the Mayflower. The 



8 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

Fortune's royal charter was destined not to en- 
dure. The Old-World King and the Old World 
institutions were destined not to endure. The 
first to go was the Old World school. They can- 
not pour the new wine of democracy into the old 
skins of aristocracy and have them hold. 

Democracy is a new spirit. It is un-European 
(if not anti-European) and no European term or 
institution can express or contain it. Yet we 
Americans have all come from European coun- 
tries, and we have all tried to carry off with us, 
as Rachel did, our fathers' Teraphim — our an- 
cient ancestral institutions. 

Some of us hail from a medieval Europe, as 
far back as the days of the Holy Roman Empire, 
and are bringing over, and are trying to set up, 
the old feudal castle, and the knight and the 
medieval monastery to do the work of this new 
democracy. Others of us come from autocracies 
and aristocracies, bringing the institutions of 
militarism and of social caste, as if these could 
be made to function in a democracy. 

They belong to our low-vaulted Old-World 
past. Their domes are too narrow for democ- 
racy. Ever since the daring dreamers started to 



THE NATIONAL SCHOOL 9 

build with Plymouth Rock their new American 
house each of them, leaving his old dwelling: 
for the new, 

** Built up its idle door, 
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no 
more." 

Would it were true ! But most of us do not yet 
realize how entirely new we are, how unlike 
Europe we are, and how futile are the mind and 
the machinery of Europe in democratic America. 

The genius of this country is Anglo-Saxon, 
English, both by inheritance and custom. Be it 
so. Nevertheless, there is not a single existing 
English institution, habit, or attitude, that, un- 
modified, will express what this country now is. 
Yet, over all the land, we are importing English 
aristocratic schools, and importing English mas- 
ters, not a few, to administer them. And we are 
sending our democratic children to these aristo- 
cratic schools to have them educated for democ- 
racy! Do men gather grapes of thorns? 

English as we are in spirit, almost fifty per 
cent of us Americans are of other than Anglo- 
Saxon stock, out of other lands than England; 
and among other things, we bring with us our 



10 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

schools — Old-World religious schools, thou- 
sands of them ; and we send our American chil- 
dren by the tens of thousands to them, schools 
named with old names, not with the new name of 
our Nation, schools which look back into a dim 
dead past, not out upon a living present. And 
we expect these Old-World schools to make 
New- World minds! Do men gather figs of 
thistles? 

One of the most mistaken institutions in 
America is the parochial school. If it is the 
purpose, as it seems, of the Catholic Church to 
build parochial high schools, in addition to the 
grade schools and colleges, so that every Catholic 
child can be fully educated without entering an 
American public school, then the Catholic Church 
becomes educationally a rival to the State. 

Why should this Church withdraw from the 
American public school and, at enormous ex- 
pense to itself, build a different school? Why in 
the fundamental process of making Americans, 
cannot the Catholic Church accept the historic, 
the established, the fundamental institution for 
that purpose? In withdrawing, it proclaims its 
distrust of the American public school, and of 



THE NATIONAL SCHOOL ii 

the American public, except the Catholic por- 
tion of it. It would seem to believe in educating 
only the Catholic public. This is not the atti- 
tude of Catholics only; but let the millions of 
Methodists do as the Catholics do; let the 
Baptists, let the Jews, let Capital, let Labor — 
let every tribe and trade, every caste and creed, 
thus set about the building-up, by the powerful 
means of education, its own closed mind, and 
our House of Democracy, founded upon the 
Rock of mutual understanding and support, 
comes crashing to its fall ! 

II 

As a fact our House of Democracy cannot fall. 
It is as yet only a foundation. We have never 
had a democracy. There have never been 
enough of us who want one in America. We 
passionately desire one in China. Each of us 
wants his theocracy, his plutocracy, his aristoc- 
racy, and insists on getting it. Democracy is as 
intensely personal as any of these, but it differs 
from them all in being completely unselfish. 
Perhaps a democracy is impossible. Many be- 
lieve the dream has already had its day, and 



12 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

must give place to something more practical. 
Democracy is still discussed, no term more dis- 
cussed, nor more disliked nor more distrusted. 
'* American Misgivings'' are not confined to our 
essayists. They are entertained by the whole 
world — this world which was to have been 
made safe for democracy, and which included 
America, of course. Events since the war make 
some of us Americans tremble for the safety of 
democracy here. We know that its enemies are 
not all in the ranks of the Reds. The ultra- 
Whites are as dead against it as the deepest- 
dyed Reds, the reactionary as much as the radi- 
cal. Let one look with contempt or suspicion or 
indifference upon so fundamental an institution 
as the public school ; let him draw off and leave 
it to the poor, the colored, the '* foreign,'* the un- 
holy, and thus divide the House of Democracy 
— that one is the enemy of America ! 

But he talks of 'liberty." '4s not liberty, 
rather than democracy, the true spirit of Amer- 
ica? Am I not free to get anything I can hon- 
estly?" — he asks. The letter killeth democracy. 
The spirit maketh alive ; and the spirit of democ- 
racy is not 



THE NATIONAL SCHOOL 13 

/*0f all my father's family 
I love myself the best" 

— IS not get, but give. 

Freedom and liberty are personal. "Give me 
liberty or give me death '* is out of Cain's mouth 
as much as out of Patrick Henry's, only Cain 
had no sense of social responsibility. I am not 
first free, then responsible — but responsible 
first, then free ; and my largest freedom is found 
only in my largest social responsibility. The 
average American parent has not come to feel 
his social responsibility in Education. His sense 
of obligation extends no farther than his own 
child. 

In a recent letter to ex- President Eliot of Har- 
vard, a New York attorney writes: 

The Board of Education in a suburban community 
of New York City, in Westchester County, of which 
I am a member, has launched a campaign for new 
school buildings, new equipment and better teaching 
in the public schools to accommodate education 
through four years of High School. We have a very 
strong group of citizens in our community who favor 
the private schools — in fact twenty-five per cent of 
our school population is in private schools. Having 
the Western point of view in public education, I have 



14 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

been amazed to see how strong the sentiment is 
against public education above the eighth grade and 
how the college men in our community who came 
through the private schools are so completely out of 
touch as to be almost entirely unconcerned with the 
equipment for public education. This in itself, to my 
mind, is a tremendous indictment against the private 
school if the tendency is to create an aristocratic 
point of view toward education. 

'* I used to think the American public school a 
good thing/' said an eminent college president 
the other day, ** until I had children of my own." 
There speaks a million American parents! Said 
another college president, ''My children have 
never gone to a public school, and never shall go. 
The thing I hate about the public school — " 

It is not necessary to detail here the things he 
hated about the public school; it is enough to 
see a college president taking this attitude in 
public, and acting true to his hates in the educa- 
tion of his children. And still another college 
president — but let me stage this saying : I was 
addressing the Harvard and Radcliffe Teachers' 
Associations. Mr. John Finley, then Commis- 
sioner of Education from New York, had sent a 
paper which closed with the suggestion, that we 



THE NATIONAL SCHOOL 15 

must have a great American Plattsburg for the 
training of public school teachers. The toast- 
master, before introducing me, said that Har- 
vard had received some millions of dollars for a 
school of education, and that Harvard could be- 
come that Plattsburg. I began by saying that I 
did not think so, for Harvard did not believe in 
the public schools; that, so far as I could find 
out, only one professor on the Harvard Faculty 
had a child in the Cambridge public schools; 
and how could a Harvard faculty prepare an 
army of enthusiastic teachers for the public's 
children, while denying them the faculty's 
children? 

Then this other college president arose, and, 
after calling me a '* foreigner" and telling me 
that I was ignorant of democracy, proceeded to 
say that no father would send his son to the 
Boston Latin School to prepare for college if he 
could afford to send that son to a private school. 
He (this college president) had gone to that 
school as a boy, but at that time it was a good 
school, ** because it was a homogeneous school" 
— homogeneity, and hence virtue, being con- 
stituted, it would seem, of Bradstreets, Wiggles- 



i6 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

worths, Mathers, Lodges, Cabots, Elliots (there 
was at least one Sharp in the Massachusetts Bay 
Colony!) ; now, he went on, it is a heterogeneous 
school — that is, made up of Sharps and foreign 
odds and ends from the Ahamovitzes to the 
Zweigenbaums, and so it is no longer a good 
school. Again, he said, if the private schools 
were closed, the only avenue for educational 
experiment and advance would be dosed; all 
we are educationally being due to the private 
schools. And lastly, answering the points of my 
discussion in order, — he said that the equiva- 
lent of a high-school course (my minimum prepa- 
ration for citizenship) for all the people was im- 
possible. The only thing we can do is to educate 
the leaders and let the rest follow as best they 
can. 

This does not sound like America, but Europe. 
It sounds ominous — yet terribly familiar. It 
may not be the dominant note in American talk 
to-day, but whether the problem is education, or 
business, or politics, or social life, it resolves 
itself finally into a caste question: of capital 
against labor; of white against black; of Anglo- 
Saxon against ''foreigner'' — of class in some 



THE NATIONAL SCHOOL 17 

shape or color against the shapeless, colorless 
mass. 

There is no denying the shapeless, colorless 
mass — though there are people who think it 
looks red. It is here. It is not yet the whole of 
America. It is not yet the major part — speak- 
ing racially. According to the census returns 
for 1910, those persons in the United States of 
English, Scotch, Welsh, Canadian (English), and 
Scotch-Irish stock numbered 49,800,000. '*The 
Census of 1920 is likely to show stationary num- 
bers, or even a decrease, for the principal ele- 
ments of the foreign-born, and an increase for all 
the native elements. The total population in 
1920 will be found to approximate 105,000,000, 
of which, it is estimated at the outset, the whites 
number about 94,000,000. Applying again the 
ten per cent increase to the distinctively native 
and allied elements, the latter group increases, 
in 1920, to 54,800,000." 

Come, now, let us reason together. Surely in 
54,800,000 of traditional Anglo-Saxon stock, out 
of our total of 105,000,000, the Lord of hosts 
hath left us something of a remnant. It does not 
look as if the Daughter of Columbia were left as 



i8 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of 
cucumbers, as a besieged city. 

New York City is besieged. Out of every 
thousand persons in New York City, 786 are 
foreign. Yet New York is an American city. In 
the 193 ''whites of native parentage" there 
seems to be leaven enough for the lump. 

If now the only question in America were the 
foreign question, and the only problem in educa- 
tion the problem of Americanization, it would 
certainly seem that 54,800,000 natives with all 
their advantage of race and position should be 
able to make over an equal number of ''for- 
eigners,'' the most of whom are eager for the 
change. 

And certainly the most natural process of do- 
ing this would be by social contact, natives and 
foreigners mingling, and where better than in the 
same school? — the foreigner changing by the 
experience, the native learning by the same ex- 
perience, many necessary things of fact and 
spirit about his own duty as a citizen, in whose 
land every second person is literally a "foreign 
body," to be absorbed into the body politic. 



THE NATIONAL SCHOOL 19 



in 

The foreigner is not the only question in Amer- 
ica, nor Americanization our only problem. 
There are questions many, and problems many; 
but at bottom they are all a problem of educa- 
tion — are all the one old human question. Who 
is my neighbor? The fundamentals in a democ- 
racy are social. Seek first democracy in educa- 
tion — as in everything American. Education 
must first be social ; the American child must go 
to school in his neighborhood, with his neighbors. 
It is better for democracy that he go to school 
with all the children in his little community than 
with all the books in the wide world ; for the les- 
sons he needs first are conduct lessons — lessons 
in what are the right feelings and faiths and 
manners of a democracy. 

How can these things be taught? By but one 
method in a democracy — the simple, single 
method of leavening. There is nothing that may 
not help, except aloofness and segregation (the 
real ills of democracy) ; but when everything else 
is done, our social lump will still need to be 



20 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

leavened — with Anglo-Saxon yeast, and with 
the yeast of democracy. 

It is not leaders we need so much as leaveners, 
many pervasive spirits working in the spirit of 
the people. The leader runs ahead of his people; 
the leavener moves among them. The leader is 
part of the machinery of an aristocracy; that 
complex of many members, and many bodies, 
held together by imposed force. In a democracy 
we are many members yet one body, where the 
foot cannot say, ** Because I am not the hand, 
I am not of the body." In a democracy the body 
is tempered together, that there should be no 
schism in the body ; but that the members should 
have the same care one for another. Who would 
be first of all in a democracy must be least of all 
and servant of all. Our social settler comes 
nearest our ideal leader, for he does not lead, he 
lives, he pervades (walks through), spreads and 
leavens. He works according to the biology of a 
democracy. 

Autocracies have need of kaisers; of armies; of 
captains. It is different in a democracy. There 
is a better power even in an army. The last war 
was won by the second lieutenants, humble 



THE NATIONAL SCHOOL 21 

human factors moving among the men. Ameri- 
can democracy needs a million second lieuten- 
ants and precious few captains of anything. We 
have them in finance, and they lead us toward 
bankruptcy; in politics, and they lead us into 
Hayti, into Santo Domingo, into Four-Power 
pacts, into ship subsidies and tariffs, where the 
people never follow them, and would be ashamed 
to go. The leader too often goes it blind, and he 
thinks the people are blind. We need pervaders, 
those who stir us as Roosevelt did. He was the 
worst sort of a leader. Where did he lead us — 
except on that one doubtful journey across Pan- 
ama? His own political party repudiated his 
leadership. He had no political objective, no 
constructive national plan. But he had a way of 
stirring up the people with his big stick. He was 
a tremendous mixer; and he leavened the whole 
lump of American life with zeal and zest and 
fervent living. Woodrow Wilson was a born 
leader. He had plans. But while he was up in 
the mountain with his plans, the people made 
them a golden calf and elected Aaron over them. 
You cannot lead the American people. How 
clearly Lincoln understood this ! He was a true 



22 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

mixer and a great democrat. His leavening 
power amounted to genius. He was surrounded 
at Washington with leaders: Seward, Chase, and 
even Gideon Welles would have snatched a 
banner and led — each to a different victary! 
Lincoln knew that slavery was wrong; that 
slavery must not be extended; that no State 
could secede from the Union without the consent 
of all the States ; and that if the forts in the South 
fell, the forts must be retaken. This is what he 
knew, and besides this he knew the people; and 
his unparalleled place in the imagination of the 
people came of his holding to that creed and 
persuading his people to hold with him. Abe 
Lincoln! Little of commanding he knew! Little 
of the dash and glamour of the hero-leader about 
him! He was of, and for, and by the people. 
And the people were with him. He and his 
people were one. They loved and trusted him. 
He was the simplest, humanest, wisest mixer and 
American we have ever produced. 

Whereunto shall I liken the democracy of 
America? It is like the leaven which a woman 
took and hid in three measures of meal, till the 
whole was leavened. 



THE NATIONAL SCHOOL 23 

Where do you get this leaven? Is there any 
school in America for educating leaveners? Yes 
— the school Roosevelt attended, which was a 
private school, and the school Lincoln attended, 
which was no school at all! We cannot argue 
from such exceptions. These two instances nega- 
tive each other. I withhold no admiration from 
Roosevelt. He lived tremendously. He has 
showed us what ends we are in ourselves. The 
world is livelier for his stay in it, not any wiser, 
perhaps, nor safer for democracy, for he was a 
supreme aristocrat and egoist. He knew the 
common people and he used them. His quiet old 
friend Burroughs made a greater bid for im- 
mortality and left behind a more durable fame. 
But that proves nothing for or against the pri- 
vate school. Mr. Roosevelt learned a few valu- 
able things in that school, but we all know he 
learned a great many valuable things in the 
ranch school out West. Lincoln learned about 
all he knew in that same frontier school. The 
question I asked was: Is there a school that will 
teach every American citizen what the leaven of 
democracy is, and how you hide it in the meal ? 
For leavening is a quiet unassuming process^ 



24 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

possible for almost everybody. Democracy may 
be as high as heaven, but it is as simple as sour- 
dough bread. 

There is such a school. If there were not, the 
first thing for this Nation to do would be to 
create one. If it is true, as Galsworthy claims, 
that ''Education is the most sacred concern, 
indeed the only hope of a nation '' — true of Eng- 
land — how much truer of America ! If the hope 
of England is not in her fleet, but in her schools, 
then the hope of France can hardly be in her 
army, but possibly in her schools, and this must 
be so with America. Armies and navies are not 
the hope of the Nation, but the curse of all na- 
tions. Yet this common knowledge is powerless 
to save us from war. Industry, commerce, and 
wealth are not the hope of the Nation. They 
both bless and curse the Nation under the pre- 
vailing social and economic conditions. This is 
common knowledge, but it, too, is powerless to 
save, for like the knowledge of war it has as yet 
had no part in our education. We must be edu- 
cated, not merely informed; we must have a 
school where such subjects can be made the 
material, universal, and national study, inter- 



THE NATIONAL SCHOOL 25 

preted and taught in the large spirit of democ- 
racy. We have such a school. The trouble is, 
we lack both the national course of study and 
the national spirit to put it through. 

This is not all there is to education. But this 
is the chief part of school education. We know 
that nations do not live by bread alone — not by 
peace alone. Peace and prosperity will not sus- 
tain a people long. A nation, particularly ours, 
is a spirit and asks for truth and beauty and 
faith — for poet and prophet and philosopher — 
for every word which proceedeth out of the 
mouth of God. And not the words which have 
proceeded only, for we cannot survive on closed 
revelation, nor on a neighbor nation's poetry, 
nor on our collected books of wisdom. We are 
new and our problems are new. We need a 
present God, and present poets and philosophers 
of our own. 

The whole of American education means 
nothing less than this: that we must educate 
110,000,000 Americans for democracy and as 
many of them as possible for poetry and proph- 
ecy and philosophy. 



26 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

IV 

My child is first a national child. He belongs to 
the Nation even before he belongs to himself. 
His education is first national and after that 
personal. We parents can hardly see this. It is 
a particularly difficult point of view for the 
highly individualized, assertive Anglo-Saxon 
whose political weakness is his undeveloped 
sense of social solidarity. Every Northman was 
a Sea-king or a Vi-king — king of a creek or a 
bay. We look upon our child as having his only 
end in himself, and upon his education as a 
means to that end. But the whole history of 
American education proves that the public 
schools were founded for the defense of the Na- 
tion, and not for the benefit of the child. The Fed- 
eral Government leaves the schools in the hands 
of the States, and every State has a chapter in its 
constitution plainly commanding the legislatures 
to provide the schools, seventeen of the States 
preambling their educational chapters wherein 
they justify the enormous cost of education as 
a national necessity, as the only safeguard for 
the rights and liberties of a free people. 



THE NATIONAL SCHOOL 27 

There is nothing paternalistic or eleemosynary 
about the public school. It was not designed to 
dole out educational alms to the needy. Whether 
the child is rich or poor matters not ; whether he 
wants this education or can use it later in busi- 
ness is not the question. The question is what 
the Nation needs and can use in its business ; and 
the Nation needs an educated citizen, so pecul- 
iarly educated that he will safeguard the rights 
and liberties of this free people. 

This is more peculiar than it appears. Other 
nations have school systems and national edu- 
cational programmes, but except for Switzer- 
land's, ours is radically different from them all. 
Our rights and liberties differ from those of other 
nations. Ours inhere in education, and rest for 
safety upon the school. This must needs be a 
peculiar school with this peculiar work to do. 

You cannot put a child through an English 
school and produce a safe American mind; nor 
through a German school ; nor through any other 
European school, nor through any special school: 
vocational, religious, or social, even though 
American, and produce the safe American mind. 
For each of these schools has some mark or ob- 



28 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

ject less than an ail-American object, and which 
is necessarily an ti- American. The Nation can- 
not stand behind these special schools, nor sanc- 
tion them, nor set its seal upon them. They are 
not shaped to teach democracy. The only school 
with this national character and sanction is the 
public school, and this alone can undertake the 
national task of making the true American mind. 

But it cannot do this until we fully realize the 

national need: until we make the school a na- 

/ tional school, the child a national child, and his 

^ education the chief concern, indeed the only hope 

of the Nation. 

When we realize this, then we will overhaul 
and refit the public school and give it a national 
course of study, bottomed upon the English 
language and English literature, but built up of 
universal history, elemental science, geography 
and economics, studied and taught in the pure 
light of democracy. 

A democracy must needs speak one tongue 
and speak it well. Give us all the same language, 
and all of us the same good grade of language, 
and you have leveled at once the greatest of 
social and political barriers. Good language is 



THE NATIONAL SCHOOL 29 

more than a hall mark. There is no truer test of 
culture, no securer sense of social safety than in 
good language, but there is also no possession in 
common, no single touch of nature more certain 
to make a whole nation kin. 

Every American child should study the Eng- 
lish language, should be taught to reverence it, 
and helped to master it — both to write and to 
speak it with sweetness and power. When Amer- 
ican boys and girls go to school to the English 
language in the faith and in the enthusiasm with 
which French boys and girls go to school to the 
French language (ours is the greater language 
and literature), then shall American education 
have made a mighty stride forward toward 
realizing its national character and mission. 

And this is as true of the literature as of the 
language. We speak the English tongue. We 
brought it with us, and we brought what is still 
the grander part of English literature with us. 
We have Americanized the language. We have 
added a priceless portion to the literature, and 
this English-American language and literature 
is what we were, and are, and shall be — the 
only literature and language that will reveal us 



30 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

to ourselves and interpret us to the world. Al- 
lowing due place to music and history, geog- 
raphy, science, and economics, we will rest our 
whole educational structure upon the English 
language and literature, using them ''from the 
first as the most direct and lasting communica- 
tion of experience by man to man/' 

No national heritage is more precious, — not 
even the glory that was Greece — than the liter- 
ature handed down with our English language. 
'*For English children no form of knowledge can 
take precedence of a knowledge of English, no 
form of literature can take precedence of Eng- 
lish literature,'' and the ''two are so inextricably 
connected as to form the only basis possible for 
national education." That is even truer of the 
American child and of a national American edu- 
cation — with our crying need of some common 
ground, some common course of study that shall 
interpret and unite us to each other. 

"Much of our social discord, suspicion, and 
bitterness," says Professor Caroline F. E. 
Spurgeon of English social life, "of our industrial 
warfare and unrest is owing to this gulf between 
classes, between industry and culture, empha- 



THE NATIONAL SCHOOL 31 

sized by the gulf between educated and unedu- 
cated speech; and nothing would do more to 
bridge this chasm than a common education, fun- 
damentally English, resulting in a common pride 
and joy in the national language and literature." 

I am not remotely attempting to outline a 
course of study; but by the end of the high- 
school course, in addition to some of the great 
books of English literature, I should like to see 
our American children reading among other 
American books Bradford's ** History of Pli- 
mouth Plantation"; Woolman's '* Journal"; 
Franklin's *' Autobiography"; a life of Lincoln; 
Parkman's '* Oregon Trail"; Thoreau's **Wal- 
den"; Whittier's poems; Dana's '^Two Years 
Before the Mast"; and '*The Americanization 
of Edward Bok"; for these books are as reveal- 
ing as they are prophetic of America. 

Whatever else our education does or does not 
do, it must unite us. It must nationalize us and 
after that internationalize us. Democracy is the 
only political and social principle broad enough 
to cover all of our peoples and all other peoples 
with us. 

Yet democracy is not the doctrine of the 



32 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

crowd. It is the doctrine of every self, single and 
supreme. Nothing of the individual is lost in 
democracy. He has rather a dual consciousness 
of self and of an over-self, of one and many. If 
denied a narrow egotism, he is compensated with 
a wider altruism. If saved from being ministered 
unto, he is given the greater joy of ministering. 
If virtue goes out of him in the common press, 
he knows that some one has been healed. 

In spite of the contrary statement, I believe 
that I know what democracy means, and I be- 
lieve I am democratic. Yet I have my house in 
the hills of Hingham, and a woodlot. I am. I 
intend to be. I will fully realize myself. If the 
State is the ideal end of my education, I am a 
very real end. 

, "One's-Self I sing, a simple, separate person, 

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse" 

— without conflict* Thus democracy offers me a 
self and a society, a nation and a soul. The 
aristocratic doctrine of noblesse oblige is a doc- 
trine of isolation and condescension. Democ- 
racy walks upright. It, too, is the doctrine of 
service — but of service for wages, the wages of a 
complete personal and social self. 



1 



CHAPTER II 
EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 
I 

■^HE average physical age of man is 
thirty- three ; his average educational age 
is eighteen, or thereabouts. A few men 
go on to school after eighteen, but they learn 
nothing fundamental, for theories, methods, and 
facts are not fundamental: they belong to the 
useful, the professional. Here and there is a 
student perennially eighteen years old in mind, 
who unlearns a few important things in and after 
college; but most freshmen are what they are, 
and after three years in college they are seniors. 
They come to college with all their educational 
clothes on, asking the faculty if it will please help 
button them up. College gives a little better fit 
to the educational garment. We live on and 
learn, but the lessons from seventeen to seventy 
are only a review and an application of those we 
learned from six to sixteen. 

In any national survey of education, there- 
fore, the higher schools and colleges are neg- 



y 



34 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

ligible. Our education as a people is that of the 
secondary schools. In them, more than in any 
other American institution — more than in all 
other American institutions — are the issues of 
an enlightened national life; issues no longer 
national merely, for the war has made them 
vital to the life of the world. American democ- 
racy is a world-issue. And the world is asking: 
What is the source and the secret of democracy? 
Certainly no democracy can be better than its 
educational system; for democracy, more than 
any other political programme, is a programme 
of education. The spirit of democracy is the 
fruit of education, and never an inheritance, un- 
less an education can be inherited, devised by 
will, and blessed upon a child by laying-on of 
hands. You can come by the spirit of aristocracy 
that way, for the God-I-thank-thee-that-I-am- 
not-as-other-men spirit is a negation and an 
assumption. One may even assume that he is a 
Kaiser and a vice-gerent of God. We cannot 
assume vice-gerentcies and the like in America, 
so we stop modestly with whatever else there is 
to assume. We all alike inherit the Constitution ; 
and it doth not appear at birth what we shall be, 



DEMOCRACY 35 

a President in Washington, or a Washington 
correspondent, or both; for every child, although 
born a presidential candidate, cannot commit 
his nomination and election to the hands of the 
priest who christens him, as he can his social 
position; he must leave it all to the large, firm 
hands of the future. 

How many American parents hate this divine 
hazard of democracy! **I will take no chance 
with my boy!'' a mother said to me recently, 
who had come from New Jersey to Boston with 
her young son ; as if the democratic hazards for 
her boy might be fewer in Boston; and as if 
money and birth and breeding brought to Boston 
might overcome the handicap of equality con- 
ferred by the Constitution upon her son. Why 
is she afraid? Because I have boys in Hingham? 
Mine are not the only boys in Hingham, as they 
have already found out, and as her boy will soon 
find out. Every boy in Hingham is a challenge 
to my boys; so is every boy in Boston, and in 
Baton Rouge, and in Bagdad. It is the girls in 
Hingham that I am afraid of. 

Money and birth and breeding count in a 
democracy — for and against a man ; education 



36 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

and purpose, however, count a great deal more 
and altogether for a man. But count how? 
What is the true end of American education? 
*'Is it life or a living?'' It is neither life nor a 
living. We can live and get a living without 
an education, as we can marry and give in mar- 
riage. But we cannot make the United States 

1^ a democracy without education. The true end of 
American education is the knowledge and prac- 
tice of democracy — whatever other personal 
ends an education may serve. Education has 
turned a corner since we went to school, and 
finds itself face to face with a bigger thing than 
life or the getting of a living. It is face to face 
with a big enough thing to die for in France, a 
big enough thing to go to school for in America — 
going to school, on the whole, being more diffi- 
cult than dying.. Life and the getting of a living 
may have been the proper ends of our private 
education heretofore; such ends are no longer 
legitimate. Neither life nor the getting of a 
living, but living together — this must be the 

V single public end of a common public education 
hereafter. 

This new and larger end demands a new and 



DEMOCRACY 37 

larger thought of education. The day of the 
little red schoolhouse, and all other little things 
in American education, must pass. The large 
schoolhouse must come. Our present school 
concepts are as inadequate as are our present 
school appropriations and programmes. We 
must reconceive the nation's educational needs; 
we must do it as vigorously, as generously, and 
as universally as we lately conceived her mili- 
tary needs; and we must create an educational 
machinery as eflfective as the military machinery 
to meet the needs. 

But what a machinery is the little red school- 
house, and the little six-hundred-dollar school- 
teacher, and the little thirty-cent interest of the 
average citizen in his public school! Can the 
world be right in thinking the intelligence and 
spirit of America a product of American schools? 
Our neighbors have long watched this democracy, 
and at last, having seen its temper tried by the 
world war, they have come to study into the secret 
of its magnificent war behavior — as if it were 
an educational secret, and might be found in our 
public schools. They were right, but they have 
been terribly shocked, and shaken in their faith. 



/ 



38 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

II 

What does the world expect to find in educated 
America? Surely nothing less than the whole 
Nation in school — for we are a literate people ; 
and nothing less than the whole Nation in school 
together, one common school — for we are with- 
out caste as a people ; and nothing less than the 
whole Nation together in a common school until 
it gets the conception of democracy, the abstract 
spiritual meaning of democracy — for democ- 
racy is a spirit, and they who know the truth of 
democracy know it in spirit. 

What our neighbor nations actually find is a 
democracy divided educationally against itself; 
wrong in its aim; weak in its purpose; feeble in 
its support; faltering in its faith; and not only 
divided, but hostile, in its educational plans. It 
is bad enough that eighteen per cent of our 
children do not attend school at all ; it is not so 
bad for democracy, however, as that our other 
eighty-two per cent should be divideii in their 
education by private, parochial, industrial, and 
the regular public schools, until we can be said 
to have no common educational programme, no 



DEMOCRACY 39 

common educational purpose, no common edu- 
cational ideal — no common school. Yet what 
else but a common school can be the head of the 
corner of democracy? We must go to school; we 
must all go to school ; we must all go together to 
school, with a common language, a common 
course of study, a common purpose, faith, and 
enthusiasm for democracy. Americanization is 
not this new educational ideal. The world is not 
to be Americanized. A few millions of foreigners 
in America need to be Americanized ; but all the 
millions of Americans in America need to be 
democratized. Nothing less than the democra- 
tization of America dare be our educational aim. 
And what an uphill task ! 

I have not worked out the new course of study. 
This chapter is a plea, not a programme. One 
thing I know: we must have a common school 
for all the people ; and all the people must attend 
a common school until every American child has 
a high-school education and has caught a true 
glimpse of democracy. It is not a dream; it is 
not impossible — unless democracy is a dream 
and impossible. 

The present standard of American education 



40 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

is a fourth-grade standard — and less ! The edu- 
cational statistician at Washington says, ''it is 
found that 6.36 per cent of the children in the 
elementary schools are in the eighth grade." 
This is not making America safe for democracy. 
On through the fourth grade to the end of the 
eighth grade, on from the eighth grade to the 
end of the high school, we must push the educa- 
tion of the whole people before we can trust the 
people with democracy. 

There will still be great need of special schools 
— for the subnormal : private schools for the 
^ feeble-minded; vocational schools for the slow 
and the stubborn ; but for the normal, one com- 
mon school only, for rich and poor, up to the end 
of the high school ; by which time we are pretty 
Rearly all that we need to be for purposes of 
democracy. 

Is this a new educational language? It is no 
new^er than the new demands, no more foolish 
than genuine democracy. The old order has 
changed, and has given place to so large an edu- 
cational need that we have neither the mind nor 
the machinery for it. Take the country clear 
across, and our educational mind and machinery 



DEMOCRACY 41 

are little better than a reproach. And our ma- 
chinery for education is better than our mind 
for it. We have better buildings, better teachers, 
better salaries — even better salaries — than 
public sympathy and support. Poorer than the 
poorest piece of kit in all our educational outfit 
is the individual American's support of his pub- 
lic school especially here in the East. 

In this new and larger education there will be 
great elasticity, providing for the special case, 
the educational machine having a transmission 
with plenty of speeds ahead, and even a reverse 
gear for those who are backward. But a larger, 
simpler, speedier education is to be provided, 
that shall reduce the number of school years, and 
thus lessen the number of special cases; that 
shall reduce the number of narrow school courses 
— commercial, general business, college, and 
vocational — to one common course, one broad, 
universal course, thus educating for democracy 
first, and after that for life and a living — and 
even for entrance into college. Entrance into 
college! O Lord, how long shall American pub- 
lic-school education suffer this incubus of the 
college? 



42 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

A course of study that fits a student for citi- 
zenship should fit him for college, the college 
course leading only to a larger realization of 
citizenship, a deeper spiritual, a broader intel- 
lectual preparation for its privileges and duties. 
College-going students and other students in 
high school do not differ in kind or in need, and 
up to the college doors should have no different 
y training; the true test for college being a moral- 
^ spiritual-intellectual test, and no such futile 
thing as a different course of study. Let all be 
called to college, and as many as possible be 
chosen — the eager in spirit, the morally strong, 
the intellectually capable. 

Give me the fit rather than the fitted. We 
must do away with our present false ** require- 
ments," that can be ''crammed" for, that 
''prep" schools can fit the totally unfit for, as if 
getting into college were a more than normal 
feat, a peculiar, highly specialized, calculating 
process that one must be fed-up for, trained 
down for, as a runner is trained for the hundred- 
yard dash, rubbed down, and coached to the 
very tape. To-day in the Boston "Herald" ap- 
peared this strange piece of educational news: 



DEMOCRACY 43 

HOTCHKISS SCHOOL WINS $.B.K. TROPHY 

CONNECTICUT INSTITUTION BOYS PASS BEST 
HARVARD ENTRANCE EXAMS 

The interscholastic scholarship trophy, annually 
awarded by the Harvard chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa 
to the school whose candidates make the best record 
at the admission examination, has been won for the 
year 1919 by the Hotchkiss school at Lakeville, Ct., 
at which the Rev. H. G. Buehler is headmaster. 

Heretofore, the trophy has been awarded to the 
school having the greatest number of candidates on 
the honor list, but, in accordance with the vote of the 
chapter taken last year, the award has now been made 
to the school whose candidates attained the highest 
average grade, this grade being calculated on the 
total records of all final candidates from the school 
competing as a group with all final candidates from 
other schools. 

This is the school of whose teachers Clyde L. 
Davis, in the ''Atlantic'* for November, 1919, 
writes : 

The masters were simply drill sergeants. ** You'd 
better remember that word, boys: you'll need it in 
June,'' was the oft-repeated remark of the inde- 
fatigable old German instructor; and it defined the 
pedagogical horizon of the whole staff. Their jobs 
depended on making their classes pass the college 
entrance examinations at the end of the year; and 



44 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

their everlasting, driving, barren, humdrum tutoring 
on the rudiments of languages and mathematics was 
anything but inspiring. 

That is the prize-taking ''preparation" for 
college! Phi Beta Kappa and the college facul- 
ties encourage this as ideal! And here is a de- 
scription of these ideally ''prepared," prize- 
taking students of this very school, by Mr. 
Davis who, as a scholarship man, was himself 
"prepared" among them: 

The ignorance of these boys amazed me. They 
knew nothing of United States history, and not 
enough geography to locate my native State with 
exactitude. They had traveled abroad, but having 
taken nothing with them, they had brought nothing 
back. They wrote illegible scrawls. Standard litera- 
ture was positively a sealed book to them ; but, on the 
other hand, they had been tutored toward college 
entrance examinations from childhood. The rudi- 
ments of Latin and algebra had been drummed into 
them, and not a few spoke French. For me, a mature 
farm-product, to compete with these fellows in learn- 
ing languages was an impossible task. Therefore my 
final humiliation was to see myself easily beaten in 
the classroom. 

These are the prize-takers at the beginning of 
their college course! This is the Rreat work of 



DEMOCRACY 45 

the private "prep" school. This is education 
according to the colleges, and imposed by them 
upon the public schools ! 

O Lord, I say, how long will the sensible sup- 
porting public tolerate this burden that the 
Pharisees lay upon the back of the public school? 
Right here must begin the reform in our public- 
school education, the public, not the colleges, 
determining what the programme shall be, and 
doing away utterly with this cramming, coach- 
ing preparatory course, wherever that course 
fails to meet the general need. 

Any special programme of training, voca- 
tional, business, or college, before the end of the 
high school, if not contrary to the Decalogue, is 
contrary to the spirit of the Constitution, and a 
menace to democracy. 

As I would do away with the college prepara- 
tory or ** professional course," so I would do 
away with the vocational course, before the end 
of the high-school programme. The voC:ational 
ideal is German, no matter how we try to clothe 
it. Such special training was in Germany, and 
is here, a deliberate attempt to industrialize 
education, to make it economically efficient, to 



46 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

create a working class or professional class. So- 
called vocational education before the end of a 
general high-school course is education back- 
ward, the training of a man into a/nachine, a 
soul into a pair of hands. It is education for 
autocracy — the German system, which, in its 
''People's Schools," carried ninety per cent of 
German children up to our eighth grade, then 
blocked all further education, except in trade and 
continuation schools. These are the ''masses," 
and not an average of one in ten thousand got 
through these "Peoples' Schools" into the gym- 
nasium, or high school, with the other ten per 
cent — the children of the "classes." 

Masses and classes until recently in American 
education have been one, the school doors open- 
ing alike to all; but now, under the guise of 
"education for a living," or in some other robe 
of light, the devil of vocational training goes up 
and down the land, installing machinery in the 
high-school basements, to steal away the quiet 
of the study room; and, holding out "Big 
Money" in one hand, and a desiccated textbook 
in the other, says to the restless high-school boys, 
"Choose!" 



DEMOCRACY 47 

American education is going vocationally 
mad, going bad; for behind this mischievous 
propaganda is a purpose and a philosophy not 
had of democracy. Let me quote a passage from 
a textbook by a native American high-school 
teacher : 

In our country, where every youth in his first year 
in school learns that he may be president some day; 
where parents permit their children to look down 
upon their modest callings; where the higher pro- 
fessions are overcrowded, manual labor despised, the 
farms deserted, we often find in the serving class a 
weak, discontented class of people. In sharp contrast 
to them were the people who served us in Germany. 
They knew what they had to do and did it. without 
feeling that it injured their dignity. 

They, the servant class of Germany, had been 
educated to servitude, he means; whereas, in this 
country, as he goes on to say, *' A *bum' wanted 
a dollar for carrying three small hand-bags for 
us to the station''; all because of this idiotic 
American teaching about some day being presi- 
dent! 

That *'bum" had had no presidential teach- 
ing. He might have had the ** business course" 
in school, perhaps; for, instead of a promise ol 



48 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

the presidency, our schools nowadays hold out 
the necessity of making money, making it quick, 
and a lot of it. '* Double your salary" is our 
educational slogan — salary, not wages. The 
next revision of the Bible will doubtless read: 
*'The salary of sin is death." The word, with all 
its pretensions, has no place in our democratic 
dictionary. Vocational training can never result 
here in either the servitude or the servility of 
Germany. The American mind reacts in an 
American way — turns hostile, instead of servile; 
mobilizes into camps, instead of castes ; and goes 
forth to fight, chanting the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. European education, as James Bryce 
says, has taught men either to look up or to look 
down. In America we look at each other on the 
level, square in the eye; and it is the business of 
our education to make that look friendly with 
perfect understanding. 

As a matter of fact, however, we are not edu- 
cating enough workers, laborers, I mean, who 
work with their hands ; nor shall we till we edu- 
cate everybody to work with his hands, to pro- 
duce something, something elemental, essential 
for human existence. Who does not do some 



DEMOCRACY 49 

creative work with brain or hands lives a mendi- 
cant, dies a pauper, and lies buried in the potter's 
field, no matter what mausoleum marks his 
tomb. We should be educated to the biology, 
the philosophy — the democracy — of labor, 
and should actually be taught a trade, all of us; 
and every manager and professional man might 
well return once in seven years for a sabbatical 
year at that trade. But such training is not the 
business of the public schools. 

I count myself a laboring man. I believe in 
labor and laborers. There must be a laboring 
class, educated as a class, and we must all be- 
long. I have always worked with my hands, and 
the best I could with my head, too. A college 
class is not a garden of cabbages; not exactly. 
Work? God works. We all work, or ought to. 
Christ has his kit of tools. It is not work that 
divides masses from classes, and sets worker 
against employer, nor is it money; it is lack of 
understanding. 

'* Capital and Labor must get together," is 
the slow and still half-sincere cry of Capital. 
That belief was not in Capital's education, nor 
in Labor's either; and both are asking, '* How? 



50 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

How can a man be born when he is old? How 
can Capital and Labor, which are now separated, 
get together?'* But they must! Then they 
must begin together, and stay together, not as 
Capital and Labor, but as schoolboys and men. 

Not long since, at a notable meeting of capi- 
talists in Atlantic City, Labor was earnestly 
urged to get together with Capital — but not 
at Atlantic City. No labor leader was invited 
to get together with the capitalists there! And 
more recently, at a still more notable gathering 
in Washington, they were brought together — 
but not in sympathy and understanding — and 
they soon separated, more hostile, and farther 
from each other, than they were before. 

The separation is educational: it began in 
school; and, wide as it now is, it shall go even 
wider with the spread of vocational and class 
education. Education and shoe-making are not 
the same thing. Said the treasurer of the Stet- 
son Shoe Company to me: ''We don't want boys 
taught to make shoes in school. We can teach 
them better here at the factory. We want them 
educated by the schools. We need intelligent 
men, adaptable men, interested men, who see 



DEMOCRACY 51 

that their welfare and our welfare are one wel- 
fare." A few hours in a shoe-shop (sixteen hours 
in even a printing-shop!) will give the green 
hand skill enough for wages, doing for him all 
that the years of distracting vocational work in 
school would do, and do but poorly. Ask the 
manufacturer if it is good business to spend 
years for hours, especially those precious school 
years so greatly needed for intelligence, adapta- 
bility, and that community of interests which 
sees in welfare, '* All for each, and each for all." 
A democracy is a whole people educated up to 
the standard desired by the Stetson Shoe Com- 
pany. It is a whole people getting together; and 
the closer together, the better for the democ- 
racy. The purpose of our public-school system 
is to start the whole people together, and keep 
the whole people together for all their young 
years, until by calling and election their ways 
must part; a parting not to be allowed before 
the end of the high-school course, in order to 
forestall the unequal ideals of the future, the 
suspicions, jealousies, and savage interests that 
education can prevent^ but for which there is no 
cure. 



52 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

Such education is not skill. It is understand- 
ing. Let vocational guidance become a part of 
every high-school curriculum; but set up no 
machine, no *'iron man/* in the cellar. Let no 
vocational work steal from the book work; let 
no trade, industrial, business, no normal or 
technical, school, divide the time with the high 
school. They must follow the high school. 

The children of the grades should have sloyd 
and cooking and sewing, to give a necessary 
variety to their study — something different, 
something for their eager hands — just as they 
should have play. These occupations tremen- 
dously add to the vocabulary, the general under- 
standing and sympathy, as well as to a better- 
working brain; for accurate hands in original 
work demand an accurate brain. But there should 
be no vocational or trade caste to this, if the 
child is normal ; and it should end with the eighth 
grade, the next four years, except for the defi- 
cient, being devoted to books. 

Technical and normal schools are increasingly 
necessary ; whereas trade schools — schools to 
teach moulding, shipbuilding, coal-mining, trawl- 
ing, and tombstone-cutting — are sheer non- 



DEMOCRACY 53 

sense. What better trade-school than the shop? 
What other possible trade school in the light of 
all the trades? According to the Census of 
Manufactures (1914), Massachusetts has three 
hundred and ninety-three different manufactur- 
ing trades. The city of Worcester has one hun- 
dred and forty-eight different manufacturing 
trades, and teaches, in its expensive and elabo- 
rate trade schools, something like three of these ! 
Is the State to set up three hundred and ninety- 
three different trade schools? Where are they to 
be set up? And how are the State's children to 
attend them? The whole effort is absurd, and 
the educational theory behind the effort still 
more absurd. The trade school can have small 
part and lot in our public educational scheme. 
The technical school, on the other hand, is a 
college and should be of college grade. A high 
school of commerce makes commerce the busi- 
ness of babes. Why not also a high school of 
medicine, of theology, of law? Is commerce less 
exacting than these other callings? and are 
merchants so much poorer mentally than other 
men, that an eighth-grade education gives them 
intellectual room and verge enough? 



54 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

We can build nothing for democracy on a 
fourth-grade foundation; it is of sand. In ex- 
alting democracy, the war has magnified and 
mightily multiplied citizenship over the face of 
the world, and revealed, not only how inade- 
quate, but how dangerous, a thing for citizen- 
ship a little learning is. Yet here is the average 
fourth-grade man inheriting the citizenship of 
the earth. The world and they that dwell therein 
have, of a sudden, become democratic — be- 
come the average man's with his fourth-grade 
education ! What will he do with his world — 
in Russia? in America? Responsibility has not 
kept pace with liberty; education with ideality. 
Politically, socially, we have suffered a series 
of ''double promotions,'* lifted from the first 
grades, and set down to problems, grades, and 
grades ahead. 

What else means the difficulty, the unrest, the 
suspicion, the antagonism everywhere, the re- 
volt of the workers ; the arming of the employees, 
the little wars in every industry, so rapidly 
settling into the lines of one vast industrial war, 
except that we do not know how to solve our 
social and political problems? The worker. 



DEMOCRACY 55 

taken as he runs, is as intelligent as his employer; 
neither is uneducated, but both are inadequately 
or wrongly educated, with gaps and twists in 
their education that can be made good only in a 
common school. 

There is but one thing to do — give us more 
education, which, in the United States, means 
an education to the end of the high school for 
every citizen, even though compelled by law; 
an undivided general course, broadly human, 
broadly democratic — and after that the shop, 
the technical school, and the college. 

Ill 

As I would do away with the ''college prepara- 
tory*' or professional course, and the vocational 
or ''mass course,'* so I would do away with the 
special private school or "class course'* in Amer- 
ican education. More education and a more 
democratic education is our great national need. 
Governments are not safe in the hands of any ^- 
single class — a democracy, of all governments, 
the least safe. Heretofore the issues dividing us 
nationally have been sectional, economic, com- 
mercial, fiscal, the political cleavage never fol- 



56 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

lowing social or ''class" lines. It Is different 
to-day. The ugly word ** class" now thrusts up 
its long, low bulk like a reef dead ahead. We 
must go about! 

Education is a class-leveler. Though not by 
any means a cure for the inequalities of life, edu- 
cation comes nearer than any other thing to 
being the lowest common denominator of the 
''vulgar fractions" of society that we call 
j / classes. American education, however, is grow- 

ing ever more divided. Instead of leveling class 
distinctions, our schools are erecting them — the 
vocational school its class wall, the private 
school its class wall, shutting in between them the 
common public school — after the order of the 
Old World, with all its Old- World antagonisms. 
A private school in a democratic system of 
education is a sort of dress-circle seat in heaven, 
un-American and an ti- American, and no substi- 
tute at all for the common public school. All 
true forces of democracy are centripetal, getting- 
together forces; for, as Chesterton puts it, "All 
real democracy is an attempt (like that of a 
jolly hostess) to bring the shy people out." Out 
where? Out where the self-confident people are. 



DEMOCRACY 57 

But what private school that I know is jolly 
hostess to the shy and timid? 

I prepared for college at the South Jersey 
Institute, a private school, at a time, though, 
when there was no common high school in my 
town. A private school, I say, but not of the 
''select" variety, or I should not have been ad- 
mitted. A lad of thirteen, I rode through the 
beautiful school-grounds on horseback, as direct 
from the farm as a can of morning milk. I had 
come on the gallop, bareheaded, barefooted — 
to my sudden confusion, when I found those 
shoeless feet tagging me into a book-walled 
study before a great, kind man, who stood look- 
ing me over quizzically, not critically ; for he was 
not selecting me, I was selecting him, and it 
pleased and puzzled him. 

For nearly five years I went to the Institute, 
which, with the coming of the town high school, 
had no excuse for being, and shortly ceased to 
be. In that same city were three other excellent 
academies, which died like the Institute and 
rose again — in the common high school, trans- 
forming the spirit, and the very body, of Bridge- 
ton with a new and a better beauty. 



58 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

It has not happened so in some other places. 
In the town where I now live the old Academy is 
still doing business. The public high school in 
this town was opened in 1872. The Academy, 
founded in 1784, did well, and in a public way, 
for almost a hundred years, what the high school 
is now doing. Yet the Academy lives on, a select 
private school now, a sort of educational wedge, 
splitting the school-children into two groups, 
and dividing the town's school interest and 
support. 

The town's public schools need undivided 
^interest and support. They are as good schools 
as they can be under the circumstances — 
though evidently they lack something which the 
. / Academy has, and which possibly they might 
have if the Academy were closed. The town's 
public schools are not so good as they ought to 
be. And I have four sons to educate. These four 
''are all I have, and nothing but the best is good 
enough for them." 

I had hardly settled in Hingham before the 
groceryman, bringing kerosene and coffee, re- 
marked as grocerymen sometimes do in Hing- 
ham, *'0f course, you'll send your boys down to 



DEMOCRACY 59 

the Academy; they are nice and clean down 
there." 

And a little later, the town's first citizen 
calmed my troubled school-spirit by concluding, 
**Then, if you don't like the public schools, do as 
the rest of us do: send your children down to 
Derby Academy." 

This is how **the rest of us" improve the 
public schools in Hingham; and in Weymouth 
next to Hingham ; and in Braintree next to Wey- 
mouth; and in Quincy next to Braintree; and in 
Milton next to Quincy — and in Boston. 

The town of Milton has just built a magnifi- 
cent high school. I pass it on my way to Boston, 
and I say, ''Truly the Commonwealth believes 
in education." And then I remember that hardly 
a child of aristocratic Milton attends that public 
school. And as for Milton's public-school teach- 
^ers, the foxes of Milton have holes, the birds 
of Milton a sanctuary for their nests, but the 
public-school teachers of Milton have not within 
the town where to lay their heads. 

A public-school teacher, in Milton, which he 
defined as a ''last refuge of feudalism," said to 
me: "There was William in the high school, 



6o EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

whose father had been for thirty years a coach- 
man for one of the most exclusive baronesses of 
the place. She directed the father to take Wil- 
liam out of school to work on the estate. ' Edu- 
cation is not for such persons,' she declared. 
* He should be taught a trade and made valuable 
to the estate.' 

**The boy was an honor pupil and slated for 
Harvard by his teachers. The Great Lady had a 
boy too, just William's age, who was with the 
greatest difficulty sticking to the private-school 
rolls — only by grace of the head-master and 
tuition fees. William's father, with good horse 
sense (being a coachman), sacrificed his job 
rather than the boy's education. 

'* There was also a well-known Boston banker 
who said to me : ' I would send my boys to your 
high school if I had the courage to do so, but the 
social connections are too valuable to sacrifice.' 

** During the war many great men were im- 
ported by influential citizens of the town, to 
arouse enthusiasm for the war. They visited the 
private school — not Democracy's high school." 

Still, Milton believes in public schools — for 
the public. Milton, itself, however, is private. 



DEMOCRACY 61 

So IS Hingham. We Hingham folk know that the 
American public-school system is the best in the 
world, and good enough — except for '*my 
children." Now, ''my children!'' Well, ''my 
children" really are extraordinary — four per- 
fect specimens 0} the average boy I They look it, 
they act it — they actually seem to know it. I 
helped them, to be sure, but not so much as cer- 
tain scions of auld Irish royalty down at the 
public school. They had help, too, from a bunch 
of stout descendants of the Vikings ; and peculiar 
help, in outgrowing their Little Lord Faunt- 
leroyity, from one who came to Hingham High 
School straight down the Appian Way. For all 
the roads that used to lead to Rome now run to 
Hingham, and terminate in her public schools. 
Here gather most of Hingham's future citi- 
zens, quite un- Americanized — young Cangiano, 
Bjorklund, Wei jane, Wainakainen, and with 
them four young Sharps, Americanized by birth, 
but not yet democratized. If these four Sharps 
can do some Americanizing — and the public 
school is the best, and almost the only, place to 
do it in — they can get in turn some wholesome 
democratizing to balance the account. 



62 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

Do not the public schools need my four boys? 

They have been taught at home the '* Whole 

Duty of Children" — to say what is true, to 

speak when spoken to — 

And behave mannerly at table: 
At least as far as they are able. 

They have been taught a deal of other things 
besides. I doubt if many American children 
have had the persistent, faithful, varied train- 
ing at home that these boys have had. Not all 
their teachers together will have put in a tithe 
of the time and labor upon their education that 
their mother has spent. Before they started to 
school it began, and day by day, year after year, 
it has gone on ever since — in poetry, history, 
nature, science, politics, and religion — constant, 
inexorable, fresh, mentally stimulating, stirring 
to the spirit, and morally chastening to a degree 
quite unheard-of in these days. 

If ever children were prepared to give some- 
thing, as well as get something, out of their 
school, these children were. And where would 
the little they have to give count for so much as 
here? And where else, in turn, could they re- 
ceive so much? Certainly in a school of only 



DEMOCRACY 63 

their own social kind they could give little ; and 
what from their own kind could they receive? 
Even from a selfish point of view I must do as I 
am doing. And this is the point of view of most 
parents : with no thought for what their children 
can give, but only of what their children are to 
get out of school — out of everything! They 
are neither taught, nor allowed, to give them- 
selves — the gift supreme, without which there 
is no true giving. 

The Law of Heaven, and of our approach to 
Heaven, which we call Democracy, demands 
that we love one another. Love waits on under- 
standing; understanding on personal acquaint- 
ance ; and such acquaintance waits nowhere else 
so naturally, so unreservedly, so honestly, so 
generously, as at the wide-open door of the com- 
mon school. Greater love (speaking democrati- 
cally) hath no man than this: that a man, rich 
and cultured, send his son and his little daughter 
to his neighborhood public school; and if he is 
afraid of the school, that he and his wife go with 
their children and camp in that school, and get 
other fathers and mothers to camp with them, 
until they have made that school safe and fit for 



/ 



64 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

their children. For verily, verily, I say unto 
them, a school in their neighborhood that is not 
fit and safe for their children, is unfit and unsafe 
for all children, and is a menace to the neighbor- 
hood. 

The schools of Hingham do need my boys as 
much as my boys need the schools. I must not 
think only of what my children get, any more 
than I must think only of what I am getting. 
Democracy demands that we all give largely of 
the precious stuff that makes for liberty, equality, 
fraternity. Silver and gold have I little, but I 
have four wholesome, intelligent, clean-minded 
boys. I will give them. Besides my own eternal 
debt to this dear land, I happen to owe my coun- 
try four good citizens, owe them to her now, and 
I will pay what I owe, and pay it now — into 
the great savings-bank of democracy, the com- 
mon public school. What else can I do and be an 
American? 

I say the Hingham schools do need my boys. 
Shall the newcomers from overseas find only 
Shoelenburgs, Chiofolos, Kozlofiskis, Salomaas, 
and twenty other nationalities in high school, 
with never a Sharp or a Smith among them? 



DEMOCRACY 65 

Are these foreigners to be the only ones hereafter 
to receive a democratic education? the only ones 
to follow the traditions? the only ones to sup- 
port the institutions and live by the principles of 
our fathers? This is what they have been doing 
even unto death. 

Here are the names of the New England boys, 
dead on the fields of France, as published in the 
Boston "Herald" — January 13, 1919, the day 
I was writing this : 

NEW ENGLAND BOYS ON CASUALTY LIST 

Killed in Action 

Buxton, Corp. Vernon C, Burlington, Vt. 
Karzomaroyk, Corp. Marion, Ansonia, Ct. 
Shanse, Corp. Joseph J., Torrington, Ct. 
Lefrangois, Priv. Rowell J., Turlant, Vt. 
Medeiros, Priv. John P., New Bedford. 
Mikenezonis, Priv. Stanley, Bridgeport, Ct. 
Moschelio, Priv. Salvatore, 44 Dunstable Street, 
Charlestown. 

Murad, Priv. John S., Portland, Me. 

Not niany Sharps and Smiths among these eight. 
Dear, gallant souls! how well they learned and 
lived their democracy! 

My own four were too young to go, but they 
would have gone — to fight, to die, had the war 



66 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

lasted longer. // my four boys could fight for 
democracy in France, they can go to school for 
democracy in the United States! Good average 
boys my four are, just the kind to grow into 
democratic citizens, and to go to school with 
those little foreign Americans, like Karzomaroyk, 
Lefrangois, and Mikenezonis — killed in action 
in January! 

And my boys are just the sort to help make 
Hingham's public schools what they ought to be. 
Hingham^s public schools are far from what they 
ought to be, because four Sharps and a Smith or 
two are not enough. All the boys and girls of 
Hingham are necessary to make Hingham's 
public schools what they ought to be — and to 
make this democracy what it ought to be; or 
even to keep it what it has been. 

But instead of all going to Hingham's public 
schools, Hingham's few boys are scattered be- 
tween the public schools and Derby Academy, 
Thayer Academy, Milton Academy, Dummer 
Academy, Andover Academy — boys who ought 
to be with my boys in Hingham's common 
school; boys whom my boys will never know, 
not even when they meet later in Hingham's 



DEMOCRACY 67 

town meeting. Yet Hingham is not so bad as its 
neighbor town of Hanover. 

Hingham and Hanover are symptomatic of 
New England, as New England is symptomatic 
of the Eastern States generally. In the way of 
schools the State of New York is perhaps the 
least democratic community in the country, 
having practically no common school. The rich, 
and even the well-to-do, of New York patronize 
only the private school. If we go farther South, 
we shall find another segregation — of white and 
black children in the schools, both being educated 
for life and a living, but neither for living together, 
for democracy. And yet the South's treatment 
of the negro is more consistent, and, on the whole, 
more democratic, than New England's. Boston 
gives the negro the best of educations and the 
meanest of chances to live. 

There are tremendous difficulties — most of 
them white difficulties — in this black question. 
I was brought up in southern New Jersey with 
the negro; I have lived and worked in Georgia 
with him; I have studied him in Boston, at one 
time knowing personally almost every colored 
man in the city, and I know that he is not an 



68 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

undesirable citizen, that we need him and we 
should make him feel it, by giving him what he 
asks — simple justice : the education, the chance 
to work, to vote, to live, to be a man, that we 
demand for ourselves. Racially there should be 
no mingling — for racial interests ; and in the 
South, where for generations yet they will live 
in segregated districts, they should have their 
own churches and their own neighborhood 
schools, but schools with the same course of 
study as the white schools ; a course of study in 
both schools that shall make for mutual under- 
standing, for mutual respect and tolerance, and 
for all that liberty and the pursuit of happiness 
can mean in America, north or south of the 
Mason and Dixon line. 

It is neither north nor south, but west of this 
line, that we shall come nearest to finding what 
American public-school education means. It is 
in the Middle West that we shall come closest 
'to our quest. The best public schools in the 
United States are the schools of the Middle West. 
The people of the West believe in their schools, 
they spend without stint for them, and, to a de- 
gree most shocking to the exclusive East and 



DEMOCRACY 69 

South, they attend them. Their faith in public- 
school education was incorporated in the Act 
of 1787, setting aside the Northwest Territory; 
wherein was a provision forever prohibiting 
slavery in all that territory and forever encourag- 
ing education. There are private schools in the 
West — in Chicago ; and there are sure to be more 
as wealth increases and social privileges multiply; 
but the present generation of the West got its 
education in the public schools; and it is the 
system of education in the West, and the spirit 
of education in the West, that should prevail 
East and West, North and South the Nation 
over. 

IV 

Under the Constitution, North and South, 
East and West share alike certain great obliga- 
tions which, taken together, are democracy, 
the preparation for which can begin only in a 
common education. However different the 
social conditions into which we are born; how- 
ever far diverging, through inheritance and 
personal effort, our individual paths, there is a 
common national inheritance into which we are 



70 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

all born, a body of common knowledge which 
we must all learn, a code of common principles 
which we must all follow, a load of common 
tasks which we must all shoulder, and a faith of 
common ideals to which we must all subscribe. 
These things in common demand a common 
experience and a common training, both of 
which are impossible once childhood has passed. 
A pure democracy does not exist, not yet, any- 
way; and if such an ideal state, by the nature of 
things, cannot exist, its bed-rock exists, broadly, 
firmly laid in the heart of youth and in our 
American public schools. 

There is no other school American enough for 
my children. There are good private schools; 
there are poor public schools; but the one indis- 
pensable lesson for my child to learn is the lesson 
of American democracy — **that each one's 
duty,'' as James Bryce puts it for us, '*is not 
only to accept equality, but also to relish equal- 
ity and to make himself pleasant to his equals." 
The best private school that fails to teach this 
lesson is a poorer school for America than the 
poorest public school that does teach it. It is 
not impossible for a private school to teach 



DEMOCRACY 71 

democracy; not impossible for it to be a democ- 
racy — or for a rich man to go to heaven. 

What democracy is, and what it is to be 
democratic — these are the first things to learn 
in school; besides them are other great things: 
to know the world of books, and be a citizen 
there; the world of nature, and be a citizen 
there; the world of art, and be a citizen there; 
the world of science, and be a citizen there; 
the world of religion, and be a citizen there. 
The world of men, however, laboring men, pro- 
fessional men, business men. Northern, South- 
ern, Western men, Hingham men: to know 
these men, yourself as one of them, that they 
are America, is to be pretty safely educated for 
democracy — an education provided against by 
the very nature of the private school. 

Says John Galsworthy : 

In my day at a public school [a "public" school in 
England is a private school here] . . . the universe 
was divided into ourselves and ** outsiders," ** bound- 
ers," "chaws," "cads," or whatever more or less 
offensive name seemed best to us to characterize 
those less fortunate than ourselves. . . . The working- 
man did not exist for us, except as a person outside, 
remote and almost inimical. From our homes, 



72 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

touched already by this class feeling ... we went to 
private schools where the teaching of manners, mainly 
under clerical supervision, effectually barred us from 
any contaminating influence, so that if by chance we 
encountered the ** lower-class** boy we burned to go 
for him and correct his ** cheek.*' Thence we passed 
into the great ** Caste** factory, a public [our private] 
school where the feeling becomes, by the mere process 
of being left to itself, as set as iron. ... All learned to 
consider themselves the elect. ... In result, failing 
definite, sustained effort to break up a narrow 
** caste** feeling, the public [private] school presents 
a practically solid phalanx of the fortunate, insulated 
against real knowledge of, or real sympathy with, the 
less fortunate. The phalanx marches out into the 
professions, into business, into the universities, where, 
it is true, some awaken to a sense of wider values — 
but none too many. From the point of view of any- 
one who tries to see things as they are, and see them 
as a whole, there is something terrific about this 
automatic ** caste" moulding of the young. And in 
the present condition of our country it is folly, and 
dangerous folly, to blink it. 

It is folly, and dangerous folly, to blink such a 
system of education anywhere. It is worse than 
folly to tolerate it in America. 

If there is a compensation, or an equivalent, 
for democracy, have the American private 
schools a patent on it? What can the private 



DEMOCRACY 73 

school do, because it is private, that the public 
school cannot do? Surely nothing which money 
can buy, for the public has the money. And it 
must spend it, until it puts every private school 
out of business. As for scholarship and deport- 
ment, the private school can hardly maintain 
the average standard of the public school, for 
private schools are notoriously sensitive to 
student fees. Did I say ** standards"? Standard- 
ization is exactly what the private school avoids. 
Superior individual training is its strong claim; 
a claim which might have some force were 
schools not machines, and were this not a 
democracy where no man but the handicapped 
needs an attendant. 

Democracy or no, a vast number of ambi- 
tious Americans, with and without money, dis- 
trust the common schools, because they are 
common, systematized, standardized — as if 
they were therefore without chance for experi- 
ment, or for individual initiative, bent, or 
''manifest destiny." President Lowell of Har- 
vard is afraid of the mediocrity of the public 
schools. I should like to call to his attention 
the picture of the prize-winning students of a 



74 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

famous "prep" school, quoted earlier in this 
book, and also beg him to study the statistics 
compiled by the Department of Education at 
Harvard, which ''show that a higher degree of 
scholarship is reached by graduates of high 
schools at that college than by preparatory 
school boys," and that, ''this fact is present in 
every department of the college." 

Public or private, a school is only a school, a 
machine; and the better school it is, the better 
machine it is, and the more machine-like is its 
product. The education for individuality can 
be had in no school: such education must come 
primarily from other sources — from the home 
first of all, from books and friends and nature; 
but, take it by and large, the individual, even 
as an individual, stands the best chance where 
he stands most nearly upon his own feet, with 
no helps but self-helps, and where he counts for 
what he is, not for what his parents are, or what 
they lay upon him. 

"The fallacy underlying" my suggestion that 
we all attend a common school, writes the head- 
master of the Canterbury School (private. New 
Milford, Connecticut), is "that this method 



DEMOCRACY 75 

would be preoccupied with establishing a merely 
external uniformity; for it would be vain to hope 
that you could make all Young America remain 
at the same level of thought and emotion in 
regard, not to their country alone, but to the 
world in which they live." 

It certainly would be vain and as undesirable 
as vain. Who could dream of such a level, know- 
ing the variety of human nature even among the 
children of the same parents ! 

*' Many of us," he goes on, '* believe that there 
is no contradiction between the acquisition of 
culture and the preservation of true democ- 
racy"; as if culture were exclusively a thing of 
the private school! And as if most Americans 
did believe that true democracy calls for movies, 
garlic, and bad manners! This will do to tell to 
the marines, and to publish in the columns of 
the New York '* Tribune" (where it appeared as 
a letter of protest) ; but tell it not in Gath, nor 
publish it in the streets of Askalon, lest the 
daughters of the Philistines rejoice! 

The complacency of this esteem is eclipsed 
only by the foolishness and the deep danger at 
the bottom of the shallow argument: **It takes 



76 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

all kinds of men to make up the world. Perhaps 
we are not wrong in concluding, in view of the 
past history of our country, that it takes all 
kinds of education to develop true democracy." 

Who says it takes all kinds of men to make up 
the world, and all kinds of education to develop 
a true democracy? It takes only democratic 
education to develop true democracy. Nor does 
it take all kinds of education to destroy true 
democracy: private school, trade school — class 
education is enough to destroy democracy — as 
it is threatening to do. 

Democracy is a difficult thing to develop, to 
live up to or down to. Says the London ** Weekly 
Times'' of October 31, 1919- 

There are thorns in the path of consistent democ- 
racy and a few of them have penetrated the feet of a 
Cabinet Minister. Dr. Addison saw no reason why 
his daughters should not be educated at the Middle- 
sex County Secondary School for Girls. He con- 
sidered it a good school. It was convenient to his 
home. *^He has as much right** — the words are his 
own — **asany other citizen to send his children to a 
public secondary school.'* Yet members of the local 
Education Committee complain, their view being 
that people who can afford more expensive schools 



DEMOCRACY 77 

should not take advantage of cheap ones, which 
ought to be left for ** ordinary people/' Dr. Addison 
has thought fit to issue a defensive statement, and 
ordinary people are smiling — but more at the Edu- 
cation Committee than at Dr. Addison. Neverthe- 
less, this absurd case has numerous precedents and 
corollaries, arising from our British exaggeration of 
class divisions. A rich man, for instance, is not re- 
spected for riding on a tramway car, though for some 
recondite illogical reason his presence in an omnibus 
is condoned. When Dr. Addison has learnt that the 
democracy likes a Cabinet Minister earning £5000 a 
year to '*keep his place,*' he will refrain from edu- 
cating his children so well. His sole care will be to 
educate them expensively. 

Let the private school act as an asylum for the 
over-sensitive, the timid, the backward and 
stubborn, a function already recognized in some 
quarters as peculiarly its own. One of my 
friends, entering her son at a New Hampshire 
public school, was asked by the superintendent: 
** Where has he been to school?'' 
*4n a private school near Boston.*' 
''Then we can't take him," was the astonish- 
ing reply. ''We have no private school in this 
district, no provision of any kind for the 
abnormal." 



78 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

The other day I stood looking across the 
street into the windows of a private school, 
windows literally darkened by the shadow of 
a great public-school building. This private 
school had been an old dwelling-house, one of a 
solid block of houses that it had appropriated 
much as a hermit crab appropriates an aban- 
doned mollusk's shell, the school accommodating 
itself to the house, not the house to the school. 
A single window to a floor let in the shadows of 
the street. The select children were in the study 
room; and as I looked, I chanced to see one of 
them seize what appeared to be her geography, 
and bring it down with a vicious smash upon the 
dear devoted head of her select sister. It was 
only the exceptional act, of course, which proves 
the abiding rule of good manners in private 
schools ; but I could only think how human and 
hopeful private-school children are, and how 
like public-school children, really; and what a 
pity to mew up these few select girls in this dark, 
inadequate, abandoned house of gentry, when 
they might have spent the afternoon across the 
street with a thousand little unselected broth- 
ers and sisters, in the spacious halls of the great 



DEMOCRACY 79 

public school — as I was spending my after- 
noon, it being the day before Christmas — 
marching down the long ringing corridors to the 
tune of *'Over There," for an hour of Christmas 
singing and story-telling in the sunny assembly- 
room; and marching back singing, **Keep the 
Home Fires Burning,'' every right hand at 
salute as the thousand little singers passed out 
between the Colors flanking the assembly-room 
door. 

Money can get culture for the public schools ; 
there is no patent on culture. All the factors of 
culture — buildings, pictures, books, music, and 
refined teachers — shall be had, and shall be 
had for all public schools, just as soon as the 
public recognizes education as strictly social, 
fitting us to live together. The Three R's will 
be the beginning of this education, and democ- 
racy the bigger end toward which it moves. 
The Three R's broadly handled, strongly, 
stirringly taught, and carried on until they 
compass the doctrine of democracy, shall be 
the common education of the future. 

Give me the literature of the world, give 
me the power of expression, give me the magic 



8o EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

of mathematics, and besides these, give me the 
idea of democracy, as a moral code, as a social 
order, as a religious faith, and you have given 
me, not only wisdom and power, but even an 
eye for the wind when I cart ashes for the city. 

It is the unabashed, complaisant American 
''mediocrity,'' the lack of money and manners, 
that Hingham and Boston and New York draw 
back from in the public schools — the unwashed 
American, in the language of my groceryman. 
It is this and more: it is really American democ- 
racy itself which our people dislike. It is from 
America herself, her best self, that we withdraw 
— to set up about us our little neighborhood 
aristocracies. 

Come to Boston, to the only public school in 
the Back Bay ! Here is the secret of Democracy 
for which the world is seeking. It has followed 
the gleam, and it has led to this school for rich 
and poor — if there are any poor in the Back 
Bay! Here shall be found the little citizens of 
the future, eleven hundred of them from the 
water-side of Beacon Street, over, far over from 
''between the tracks"; little seeds in the cold- 
frame of democracy, seatmates, classmates, 



DEMOCRACY 81 

playmates together in the Nation's Common 
School ! 

Common School! the nation has public 
schools, and private schools, but no common 
school. Here are eleven hundred children in this 
Back Bay public school who are none of them Back 
Bay children. True, there are children from the 
Back Bay here — cooks' children, coachmen's 
children, from over on Beacon Street — while the 
rest are a floating riflf-raff from somewhere west 
of Boylston Street, between the railroad tracks. 

Back Bay children used to attend this public 
school, and a few may still attend. When it was 
made thoroughly democratic, however, the Back 
Bay withdrew its children, en bloc; but not its 
patronage. Back Bay women, believing in edu- 
cation and culture, have privately supplied this 
school with their money, ever since they de- 
prived it of their children — money for drawing, 
dancing, singing, and a school visitor. And all 
these things money can buy; but the thing that 
money cannot buy is democracy. Only Back 
Bay children can supply the Back Bay school 
with democracy, and Back Bay children are not 
allowed to go to this Back Bay school. Eleven 



/ 



82 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

hundred children in the only Back Bay public 
school, and scarcely a Back Bay child among 
them! 

As a nation, we understand the theory of 
democracy; collectively, we are eloquent preach- 
ers of the doctrine ; but as individuals, we prac- 
tice a different thing. We can die for democracy. 
Yet we cannot go to school for it; we cannot he 
democratic. We fought to make the world safe 
for democracy, and now we are arraying our own 
citizens in warring camps of class and mass by 
a system of ''education for a living," and by 
another system of ** education for life," for place, 
and power, instead of for liberty, equality, 
fraternity. Does God laugh? He must laugh, 
else despair of the human race would kill Him. 
Here are the German people with their new 
republican constitution abolishing all private 
schools, both elementary and preparatory; 
sweeping off the stage, along with titles of honor, 
class privilege, the Iron Cross, and all other 
accouterments of the ''old imperialism," the 
thousands of private educational establishments 
which flourished throughout the fatherland be- 
fore the war. J/ That the German people, with 



DEMOCRACY 83 

their intense faith in the power of education, 
should have done this is a significant sign of the 
times*' — in Germany! 

But in America? We are invading the little 
republics south of us and enslaving them; we 
are holding the Philippines against every Ameri- 
can principle of justice and honor; we are 
standing aloof from crying Europe like craven 
cowards; we are pitting Capital against Labor 
to the verge of civil war; and only yesterday 
at Washington, D. C, at the dedication of 
the great Lincoln Memorial the Jim Crow law 
was enforced at the point of the bayonet in 
democratic America ! 

I have four sons to educate in America — one 
a politician, I hope; one a preacher; one a poet; 
one a combined farmer and a college professor, 
may be! I am ambitious for them. But pro- 
fessor, or poet, or preacher, or politician — I 
care not what — one thing they shall be, if the 
public schools can make them: they shall be 
democratic citizens of this great democracy, 
taught to accept equality, taught to relish 
equality, and taught to make themselves pleas- 
ant to their equals. 



1 



CHAPTER III 
EDUCATION FOR INDIVIDUALITY 

I 

"^HERE IS a little bay in one of the rooms 
of our house, the width of a window, the 
depth of a child's crib, which, in the 
blue-print, was for the baby. The young couple 
who built this house had right intentions in the 
blue-print. They told the architect what to do, 
and he did it; but the young pair weakened and 
kept a bureau in the little bay instead. That 
couple belong to the passing generation. They 
built at a time when at least one window in a 
house of forty was still dedicated to the chance 
of children ; whereas my generation has become 
altogether practical, clearly recognizing in the 
blue-print the greater convenience of bureaus. 
If children come, as they do sometimes, it is 
quite by accident; and you build hospitals for 
accidents. In short, accidents ultimately are a 
charge on the general public, to be provided for 
out of the public funds. 



INDIVIDUALITY 85 

The public machinery for saving parents from 
their children approaches perfection. When 
some mechanical contrivance is found for manu- 
facturing babies, the public will then have 
assumed the entire child-responsibility. At 
the present time a public something or some- 
body — creche, or nurse, '* home ''-kindergarten, 
cradle-roll, scout-master, camp, or school — 
attends the babe from birth straight through to 
business, or debut — where a public caterer 
provides the refreshment, a public orchestra the 
music, a public house the ballroom, and only the 
general public is lacking to complete what, since 
the christening, has been a public affair. 

On my daily in-and-out-of Boston I pass the 
Y.M.C.A., the Huntington School, the Forsyth 
Dental Infirmary for school-children, the Chil- 
dren's Hospital, Miss Winsor's school for girls, 
the Boston School of Physical Education, Saint 
Joseph's Industrial School, the Blind Babies' 
Home, the Little Wanderers' Home, a great 
parochial school, the Milton Academy for boys, 
the same for girls, the Quincy Boy-Scout Head- 
quarters, a public playground, two or three 
kindergartens, several Sunday schools, and 



86 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

public schools at every turn — signs of the 
public's determination to stand in loco parentis; 
some of it for necessary public ends, but much 
of it a poor public substitute for parents and 
private homes. Along the roads I dodge little 
groups of children forced into the edge of the 
honking swirl to play, father and mother for- 
saking them, and the courts and the A.L.A. tak- 
ing them up. 

Most parents provide for their children ; some 
take personal care of their children; but few 
indeed are they who can be forced to take any 
part in the education of their children, educa- 
tion having become the business of schools, a 
factory process, turned over entirely to the 
public. Here and there is a sublime parent who 
plods doggedly over the alphabet and the 
algebra, getting an education for himself at this 
late day; but such are rare, the run of parents 
putting their babes into the kindergarten or 
some other educational incubator, while they 
themselves slip off the educational nest like 
cuckoos and cowblrds. 

** Whatever am I to do?" cried a mother to 
me. '* School closes on the ninth of June and 



INDIVIDUALITY 87 

Tommy comes home ; and the Camp does n't 
open till the seventeenth! Here I am left high 
and dry with Tommy on my hands all that 
time!" 

Tommy is getting something out of his 
boarding-school, and something out of his 
summer camp on Moosehead Lake; but he is 
not getting what he has a right to out of his 
home. 

Much in our education is conventional and 
universal, calling for drill, efficient school-drill; 
many of the movements of education are 
mechanical mass actions, which require training 
by squads and companies, like soldiers. All 
the social aspects of education, all the together- 
ness of it, can nowhere be had so well as in 
school. And this is a very essential part of edu- 
cation. The professional teacher is no hireling. 
He is a necessary member of society, an indis- 
pensable factor in general intelligence, and so 
holds in his (or her) hand the very fate of the 
world. No one can take the professional teach- 
er's place, as no substitute can be found for the 
institution of the school. Parents and home are 
not substitutes; nor, on the other hand, in a 



88 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

complete education — an education for individ- 
uality — are professional teachers and schools 
a real substitute for parents and homes. 

If education for democracy is understanding 
based on common training and personal ac- 
quaintance in school, then education for indi- 
viduality — a thing as elemental and personal 
as life itself — cannot possibly be the sole prod- 
uct, or in large part, the product of any school, 
but must begin, where individuality begins, in 
the cradle, finding its first and freest develop- 
ment in the home, the only institution of civili- 
zation devoted to the oneness of life as against 
life's many-ness. The class, the school, the 
group-idea, is a prime factor in education for 
democracy. Nothing better has been devised 
to this end than our common public schools. 

But democracy is only a system of govern- 
ment, only a way of living, and not life itself. 
The stability of our Government must be found 
in its democracy. The glory of our Nation must 
be like — 

''To the glory that was Greece 
And the grandeur that was Rome" 

— lines like these of Poe ; lives like those of 



INDIVIDUALITY 89 

Franklin and Lincoln. The glory of Nations is 
not their institutions, but their men, their indi- 
viduals. Communism is an institutional govern- 
ment — the institution first and supreme. Democ- 
racy puts the individual first, but stops short of 
making him supreme. The State exists; exists 
for the individual ; to set him free with a freedom 
shared by all — the freedom of democracy. Be- 
yond this is still another freedom — of the indi- 
vidual soul, life, as distinct from a way of living. 
So here, in spite of my democracy, and the 
mingling multitude, here am I, ''lone- wander- 
ing,'* in endless search of myself. For aeons I 
have been searching, from star to star down the 
ages, until I chanced this way, upon this daring 
experiment in democracy, which deeply inter- 
ests me, and for the time delays me in my cease- 
less search. I love the idea of democracy. I 
believe in liberty, equality, fraternity. I believe 
also in the divine right of kings; and if any 
kings were born unto my royal parents, or if 
any have been born unto me (as I suspect four 
have), then they must have their divine rights: 
must leave this crowd, this good, this necessary, 
this commonplace crowd, and wandering on 



90 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

with me, must search until each of us comes to 
the kingdom of his soHtary soul. 

I AM. If I live with ordinary people, God 
also dwells among them, there being no other 
sort. I am one of them. All I have, they give 
me. All they give me, I would give them back, 
and more. But giving them all I have still leaves 
me all I am. I cannot give this; they cannot 
receive it. I am that I am; as God is. And 
this essential self, this eternal I, cannot go with 
anybody to school. 

II 

How in a democracy and during a common- 
school training, am I, this essential self, to be 
educated? 

Whatever leads me out, whatever deepens, 
quickens, strengthens the personal, the peculiar 
in me, the hent of my nature, educates the indi- 
vidual in me. The school can develop what I 
{ have in common with others; what I am in 
myself will often be repressed, discouraged, 
defeated by school, unless I am more powerful 
than the machine, or find freedom or help from 
without. The most natural and powerful of 



INDIVIDUALITY 91 

these individualizing forces should be the home. 

One of the insistent charges brought against 
the public school is that it ignores personality, 
hinders the brilliant, and is attended by terrible 
risks — all of this because it is a public school. 
But these faults are neither public nor private — 
they are just school, any school, an inherent fault 
in the machine. Moreover, they are inherent in 
human nature, too — the risks, I mean. God 
planted three risks in Eden: Adam, Eve, and 
the Tree; and Eve had no choice but to take 
two of them! Risks have to be taken; and the 
sooner certain of them are taken, the better — 
while still holding little Eve's hand in your own, 
you can show her how, without shying or sigh- 
ing, she can safely meet them. I am afraid of 
life's risks; but I am giving my children all the 
varieties of them found in the public schools, 
knowing that the best private school in the land 
has quite as choice a selection. 

Just so I give them night air to breathe at 
night, it being the only kind there is at night; 
and a child cannot stop breathing because it is 
night. Children need risks as chickens need grit 
in their gizzards. The only way to save a child 



92 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

from risks is to forestall its being bom. Once 
conceived, a child is little else than a risk; and 
when he starts to school he must be told of the 
risks, must be taught how to meet the risks, how 
even to risk the risks and to take life's daring 
chance. If there is an individualizing force, and 
one better than another in the whole school 
programme, it is the risks at school. 

The only peculiar risk of the public school is 
incident to and inherent in, democracy, to be 
escaped by extraterritoriality, change of citizen- 
ship only, not by withdrawal into some un- 
American caste school, call it ** Country- Day" 
'Progressive'' or ''Miss Pretense's Select." All 
the evils of your local school and mine are ours 
to correct, not to shun and so help perpetuate. 

And as for the other charge against the public 
school, of hindering the brilliant and making for 
mediocrity — that is the fault of all schools, so 
far as it is true. It is largely false, however — 
pure academic talk, indeed, and flatly contra- 
dicted by human nature. Neither principalities 
nor faculties can seriously thwart the brilliant 
mind ; and if personality so feeble were, 
*' Heaven itself would stoop to her," 



INDIVIDUALITY 93 

as Heaven has time and again, and as Heaven 
did in the original pattern of personality. 

The public school does not recognize the bril- 
liant mind as standard. But what other school 
does? Which is the All-Brilliant Boys' School? 
And does its headmaster still live? How I covet 
the headship of the All-Brilliant School, where 
nature breeds 

"Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things," 

— the intellectually overdone, the physically 
underdone, . the morally undone — prenatal 
freaks in need of a surgical operation, or, it may 
be, a spanking. The All-Brilliant School is a 
reform school. The public school (the private 
school, too) must specialize in the average. The 
school has a mass work to do, a national func- 
tion to perform — to educate for democracy; 
the education for individuality must be given us 
everywhere, but not in any school. The terms 
are almost paradoxical. You can school the in- 
dividual, but you cannot school individuality, 
either in a public, or in the most select of pri- 
vate schools. Individuality can be educated, 
but it cannot go to school. 



/ 



V 



94 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

Clearly recognizing the social and the indi- 
vidual ends of life, we as clearly recognize two 
principles in education — one making for social 
solidarity, the other for individuality. A true 
American education must realize the highest 
individuality, as well as the widest democracy. 
Dedicating the school to the ends of democracy, 
we shall find the education for individuality 
wherever we can. And we find it everywhere, 
but nowhere so close at hand, so early at work, 
and so powerfully at work — if it works at all — 
as in the home. Here the poet is born, and here, 
not in school, he is educated for poetry. 

The precious, personal thing — 

"The soul that rises with us, our life's star,** 

hath here, if anywhere, its rightful place as- 
signed it in the shining heavens. No school can 
do this. No school-teacher to the end of life's 
lessons has quite this celestial chance. 

Yet I owe much first and last to my teachers. 
As I look back I seem to see a teacher at almost 
every fork of the road. Whenever I came up 
to a great decision, a teacher was there with 
wise counsel — teachers whose names might 



INDIVIDUALITY 95 

stand as titles to some of the most significant 
chapters in my life. It is a great thing to be a 
teacher, a tremendous thing! But it is a more 
tremendous thing to be a father or a mother, 
where education for individuaHty is at stake. 
Yet, beside the average home, the little red 
schoolhouse, as an educational center, looks like 
a university; and the average red-schoolhouse 
teacher, poor as she is (and she is terribly poor), 
when put beside the average parent, is a teach- 
ing genius. 

Life should be reconceived in terms of the 
child : our towns should be destroyed and built 
again for the child; houses torn out and made 
over for the child ; home life reordered and ad- 
justed to the child; marriage approached, and 
entered into, for the child; the very education 
of boys and girls to include the meaning of the 
child ; and if it is a question which shall have the 
higher education, the boy or the girl, send the 
girl to college for the sake of the future child. 
I have said elsewhere that the hope of the race 
is in Eve — in her making the best she can of 
Adam; it would be truer to say, in her making 
the best she can of little Cain and Abel. 



96 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

How small a learning, alter all, it takes to 
teach the alphabet and the multiplication-table 
and the Bible! How much time it takes, though, 
and patience, and joy in your children, and love 
of learning! But not any more of love and joy 
and time than parents who take their children 
at par can afford to give them ; nor more than we 
have actually given our children in our own 
home. 

Ill 

''Oh, your home is exceptional!" Our home is 
exceptional — it is servantless, and has been 
since the beginning of the war; it is so remote 
that I must rise at 5.30 a.m. to start the fire, in 
order to catch a train for Boston in time for my 
first lecture at 10 o'clock; and so exceptional is 
the place that, when I get home at night, I 
descend from my car, gaze out over the land- 
scape, and exclaim, ''Mullein Hill, I am here!" 
Let no one tell me anything about this excep- 
tional place or its exceptional inhabitants. I am 
tolerably well acquainted here ; and I know that 
for glorious sunrises and inconveniences and 
ordinary folk this hilltop is positively unique. 



INDIVIDUALITY 97 

Education never went forward under greater 
difficulties of this sort. Yet forward it has gone, 
steadily, the main thing of the day, the great 
circumstance of Ufe. My part in it has been 
small: that of janitor, and school committee, 
and sometimes pupil, the teaching being largely 
done by the children's mother. Still, I am on the 
Faculty, and was present the day the systematic 
work was begun : the day the oldest boy (he was 
five), seeing a picture of John Gilpin in the back 
of a magazine, asked who he was and where he 
was galloping. Down came the old leather- 
bound Cowper, and away went the five-year-old 
to Islington, to Edmonton and Ware, then short 
about, back over the road again — 

* Nor stopped till where he had got up, 
He once again got down.*' 

Gilpin rode the Calender's horse that day. Neck 
and neck with him on Pegasus rode the boy, con- 
scious for the first time in his small years of the 
swinging rhythm in the gait of the steed, and of 
the beat — the beat — of the golden hoofs. 

Soon there was another five-year-old up 
behind his brother (now six) ; and with that we 
bought Pegasus, and gave him to the children — 



98 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

as good an investment as we ever made. None 
of our children lisped in numbers, and perhaps 
none of them will, but not for lack of poetry. 
Poets are born, of course, and are made after 
being born, too; but the real poet is something 
more: he is, and was from the foundation, a pre- 
ordained part of the divine scheme of things; 
but next to him, in the divine order, comes the 
lover of poetry. I agree with Dr. Arnold, the 
master of Rugby, that, if I could teach my boys 
but one thing, that thing should be poetry — to 
strengthen their imagination, to chasten their 
sensibilities, to quicken and deepen their emo- 
tions, to give them their glorious mother-tongue, 
and the language of real life, and the significance 
of real things — which is all ''flub" and ''float- 
ing island'' to the "practical'' man. 

"John Gilpin" was followed by "The First 
Snowfall," "To a Waterfowl," "The Death of 
the Flowers," " I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," 
Addison's Hymn, "Sir Patrick Spens," the 
First, Eighth, Twenty-Third, and Twenty- 
Fourth Psalms — all of them committed to 
memory; the Eighth Psalm, recited under the 
listening stars; "The Death of the Flowers," 



INDIVIDUALITY 99 

conned over and over as we tramped the naked 
woods in the gray melancholy of November. 

All this time they were learning to read for 
themselves, chiefly with the fascinating pictures 
in the advertising ends of the magazines. Never 
was there a school primer that made words so 
compelling ! The things to eat — cake all true to 
color, all cut and ready to pick off the plate; 
stuff to drink; things to wear; places to see; end- 
less, wonderful ! ** What do the words say? ** was 
the constant duet. This was not *' learning to 
read" — it was eating and drinking, bathing, 
and climbing — living in words. 

The teacher used any ** method," and all 
methods (based on the phonetic), the eager 
minds grappling with the syllables in a catch-as- 
catch-can tussle for their tantalizing stories. 
That first reading lesson began with the pretty 
sounds, *' Coca-Cola — as Refreshing as a Sum- 
mer Breeze or a Dip in the Sea"; and the next 
lesson was, ''Peter's Milk Chocolate, as High as 
the Alps in Quality"; and the delicious thing 
was done! They had learned to read, and were 
quickly at work with their new magic in ''The 
Water- Babies," their first reading-book. A few 



loo EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

lines a day, reviewed the next day, with lines in 
advance, and soon the story was coming steadily, 
and faster and faster as the familiar word-faces 
multiplied toward the middle of the volume. 
What a delightful way to learn! And such a 
story! such a sermon! such a lot of fun! such 
sweet verses ! such a truly great book, too ! Then 
they did it over again; and later on, these two 
put the two younger boys through it, until Tom 
and Mrs. Be-done-by-as-you-did came and 
joined our family. 

Next it was ** Mother Goose," then ^sop 
"in the brave old seventeenth-century edition 
of Sir Roger L'Estrange," then Alice, then 
Pilgrim, then — I have lost count; but I know 
that right soon they were reading the "^Eneid" 
in Mr. Harlan Hoge Ballard's fine metrical 
translation ; and with that their reading lessons 
were done. 

But the "iEneid" was a summer's work. 
Daily at ten they had their Virgil, reviewing the 
previous lesson, and reading ahead until the 
clock struck eleven. This, I think, has been one 
of their greatest educational experiences: the 
heroic story, the epic characters, the glorious 



INDIVIDUALITY loi 

poetry, the legend, the lore, the love of the past 

— all of it of incalculable worth. 

Such reading is not for fact ; it is for imagina- 
tion and feeling. All great literature is simple 
enough for children, as easy to give them as 
**The Katzenjammer Kids.'' Virgil is a noble 
book for children. A single incident from the 
reading will show the strong grip of the story 
upon their minds. 

Day after day, the reading had gone forward, 
and was now at the scene of the fall of young 
Lausus, and the grief of his father Mezentius, 
who, staggering to his feet, at this dire news of 
his son, mounted his strong steed, Rhoebus. 

Round and round the great ^neas he rode, 
filling the shield of his enemy with a forest of 
lances, until the Trojan, desperately pressed, 
suddenly burst from behind his shield upon the 
already wounded Mezentius and — 

"Deep in the hollow skull of the horse he buried a javelin ** 

— the steed, in its fall, pinning Mezentius to the 
earth, with ^Eneas, dagger drawn, triumphant 
over him. A mighty shout shakes all the battle- 
field. And then a hush ! Mezentius is speaking: 



102 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

"Why, cruel enemy, standest thou here with threats and 
revilings? 
I have no quarrel with death," 

when a smothered cry breaks in on the reading. 
With cheeks flushed, eyes wide with pity, and 
breath hardly more than sobs, the two little 
listeners hear the fallen warrior ask: 

"Grant that entombed by the side of my son, we may 
slumber together " 

— when a little hand creeps out and covers the 
rest of the passage, a little head drops weeping 
upon the table, while the other little listener, 
dry-eyed, slips silently down from his seat and 
buries himself in the lap of his mother. 

This was a deeply significant event in their 
education. They may not have been born poets; 
but the love of poetry was born in them with 
this experience, making them ready now for 
school, and even for college — proof against the 
possible dullness now of college and school, and 
possessed now forever of poetry as an inherent 
quality in the very nature of things. 

I should like to name here many more of the 
things read in this creative fashion before the 



INDIVIDUALITY 103 

oldest boy was ten, when he and his brother 
began to go to school. Yet education is neither 
much nor little, but the ^^^Eneid" — in this case 
— or whatever awakes the soul to an immortal 
love, or possesses the mind of an immortal 
power, or gives the spirit, to have and to hold, 
an immortal truth. 

Next to the out-of-doors for this purpose I 
would put poetry. Words are the shadow of 
character and style in speech is so nearly the 
same as personality that we call the style and the 
man one. An education for personality must 
embrace the essential quality of things which is 
beauty. And I know of nothing else so likely 
as poetry to reveal that quality in Nature 
herself and make me feel 

"A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.** 

It is highly suggestive that \yilliam Dean 
Howells says of his father's library: ''His own 
choice was for poetry; and most of our library, 
which was not given to theology, was given to 



104 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

poetry." It was in this library, with this poetry, 
that Howells got a most significant part of his 
early education. 

IV 

An education for individuality should include in 
a large way the essential beauty or poetry of 
things; the essential order or history of things; 
the ultimative values or the religion of things; 
and, in childhood particularly, the eternal yea 
and nay, or the reality, of things. 

This is a curriculum, in large part, quite 
beyond the compass of the schools, a course of 
study, too early, much of it, and too intimately 
personal, for the schools. It must be done out- 
side of school, and often in spite of the school. 

So, the reading went on in our house a little 
every day, after school was begun; and during 
the summer vacation the old order was entirely 
resumed — a quiet steady push through the 
'^ Iliad," the *^ Odyssey," the ''Tanglewood 
Tales," the *' Wonder-Book," Gayley's 'Xlassic 
Myths," ''The Frogs" of Aristophanes (Mur- 
ray's translation), and many, many books 
besides; while still such reading was utterly un- 



INDIVIDUALITY 105 

suspected of being less real joy and boy-excite- 
ment than outdoor work or play. 

How can such reading be made possible with 
the day's work what it is? In answer to that 
question I might do well to touch here upon 
another of our devices — the daily reading 
aloud — which went on with what I have just 
described, and which, so far as the children can 
remember, had no beginning, so early was it 
started. 

A nap at noon allowed the boys to sit up until 
eight o'clock in the evening for this hour of out- 
loud reading. Their mother usually held the 
book. With faces scrubbed, each in his ''bear- 
clothes'* and bath-robe, ready for bed, the four 
would range themselves in small chairs before 
the fire, listening, night after night, year after 
year, to story, poetry, history, biography, essay, 
travel, the ''Atlantic," the news of the day, until 
that evening hour had become as studded with 
shining books as the clear sky last night was 
studded with shining stars. 

This calls for a desperately simple sort of life. 
A child, however, is a desperately simple sort of 
creature; and life is a rather desperate sort of 



io6 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

thing, with or without children. Still, a good 
book is a good thing; and a man's fireside in the 
country is a comfortable place; and four shiny- 
eyed listeners, if they are little and chance to be 
your own, add a good deal to the book and the 
fragrant fire; while a good reader, if she loves 
reading aloud, and if she knows how to read 
aloud — I say that she also helps to rob the hour 
of its very desperate aspect. 

It is impossible to catalogue here all these 
open-fire books — more poetry, story, history, 
biography, and nature than the children will get 
in college, or have time for after college, possibly. 
Yet it is not the many books, it is rather the kind 
of reading, that counts: for instance, Dana's 
'*Two Years Before the Mast," with its trip 
around the Horn; then Lewis and Clark's 
** Journal," with the overland adventure down 
the Columbia; then Parkman's ''Oregon Trail," 
and '*The Conspiracy of Pontiac" — a more 
thrilling series for adventure than ** Dead wood 
Dick, or The Bucket of Blood," and for all that 
forms the vast and picturesque background of 
our American literature and history, a better 
course than they will ever have in college. 



INDIVIDUALITY 107 

We no longer keep up the reading regularly; 
the cares of this world and college courses mak- 
ing short shift of that seven-to-eight hour; but 
the old habit is strong upon us, and all through 
this Christmas vacation we have nightly had the 
reading and the fire, and the same four boys, but 
bigger now, with tears of joy on their faces at the 
doings of Sam Weller and the Pickwickians. 



Early in education for individuality should 
come universal history for the essential order of 
things in this personal world. The child's mind 
is diagrammatic. It likes beginnings and ends. 
It draws a map. It wishes things related, and all 
brought home to Hingham. This only means 
that the child first feels out itself, and tries to 
explain the world in terms of self. The study of 
history with little children is imperative. 

Nothing in our home education is so simple or 
so suggestive as our work in history, which, like 
the reading, began very early — with a revolv- 
ing globe of the world for geography, and with 
Swinton's ''Outlines of the World's History" 
for story and chronology. 



io8 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

Starting from Hingham as their geographical 
centre, the children would follow on the globe a 
steamship line to London for John Gilpin's ride. 
This became a habit. Whatever study was 
going forward about the step-ladder table, there, 
among the closely crowded heads, was sure to be 
the revolving globe, with the geography of the 
situation — poem, or whatever it might be — 
before them: steamship routes as real as moun- 
tain ranges, Peking as near as Provincetown — 
the world never a flat map as it was to me, but a 
whole round sphere in this one globe, and an 
unbroken human story in this single book of 
Swinton's. 

This study of Swinton was the beginning of 
their historical and political interests, and of 
their sense of the sequence, of the relations, of 
the interactions, and of the unity of human 
things, that has made history and literature a 
living thing to them, and life right here in Hing- 
ham a universal, as well as a personal, thing. 
Nothing has made them so free of the world, 
intellectually so free and unafraid, so variously 
interested in men and affairs, as this study of 
Swinton. They read the book through, then 



INDIVIDUALITY 109 

through again, and again, using up that copy, 
and thumbing wretchedly a second copy that I 
was obhged to get them. 

This was the trunk-line of their educational 
travel. Everything went forward by this through 
route. The revolving globe on their table made 
all things right in space, the outline history made 
the same things right in time, and with time and 
space put to rights, this world, so full of a num- 
ber of things, was quite set to rights in their 
young understandings. Take the Swinton your- 
self and, running the continuous thread of its 
story through your world of spilled and sprawl- 
ing facts, see how neatly it strings them to- 
gether! With the children it was magic. The 
picture of a ruined temple on the wall of their 
room belonged here or there in the history; the 
books of the house were searched — poems, stor- 
ies, lives of men — because they enlarged the 
lessons in the history ; the fixed stars in the skies 
became the firmer fixed because the little learn- 
ers had come upon Ptolemy, Copernicus, and 
Galileo in their history. And so with everything 
in turn : the Pyramids in Egypt, the snowy peaks 
in Alaska, Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees, to our 



1 lo EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

own great Abraham in Washington of the 
Americans — all came and took their proper 
places as the little torch-bearers went flaring with 
their history down the shadowy street of Time. 

This experience was fundamental. Behind all 
their thinking, at the bottom of all their ranging 
interests, ordering and explaining all their open- 
ing world, was this generalized history. Such 
general history, vividly taught and realized, is a 
prime need of our national education programme* 
Here the world-clans gather and go to school, a 
score of nations in a single school; and nothing 
but history, history generalized, then focalized 
upon our place and times, will show that all 
places and times have been waiting for this one 
place and time — for true democracy, the divine 
event, not now so far off, toward which the 
whole creation has these long dark centuries, 
been moving. 

And for individuality such study can hardly 
be started too early ; nor can too great stress be 
laid upon it, either in the home or at school. 
It is both fact and story, the natural meat and 
drink of childhood ; and this short universal his- 
tory, without thinning or Rollo-ing or babying 



INDIVIDUALITY in 

in any degree, will be, not only meat and drink, 
but the sweetness and the light of democracy, 
the rightness and the reasonableness of such a 
personal faith and works even though we live 
to-day in Hingham. 

VI 

Perhaps the most powerful individualizing in- 
fluence in the world comes out of direct contact 
with nature. No parent will neglect the wide 
spaces, the deep solitudes, the mighty forces of 
storm and calm, the everlasting hills, and the 
stars — the stars that in their courses seem to 
set a stellar course for each human child-soul; 
nor will a wise parent fail to show his child the 
''meanest flower that blows," and its riddle, and 
its poignant beauty, and its pain. I shall touch 
upon this phase of education in the next chapter; 
here I am trying to suggest a course of study in 
books, out of school, that shall supplement the 
school course, for a hint to the parent of the 
average child of how that child may be taught to 
enjoy his own mind, and how he may come to 
reign in the realms of his own solitary soul. 
Nothing will take the place of nature herself. 



112 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

The child must have the out-of-doors and no 
substitute; but there are many good books 
within the school list, and outside of it, that 
will be to the confusion in nature what the out- 
line history of the world proved to be among the 
tangled facts of human life. In our own study 
such books as Arabella Buckley's *' Fairy Land 
of Science," ''Life and Her Children/' and 
''Winners in Life's Race" not only let the long 
geologic ages come creeping by, but those books 
had the power to invest the simple common- 
place everyday things, poUywogs, even poUy- 
wogs, with all the right and reason of the planets, 
and endow them with a life-story stranger than 
any fable dreamed by ^Esop. 

The world of real things is not too much with 
us. It is the world of make-believe, of twisted, 
tortured, half-seen, half-realized things that is 
too much with us. An education for individu- 
ality will embrace real things, will teach the 
child to handle them, call them by their right 
names, and demand of them their ultimate 
values. Those values reach down to religion. 
"This knowledge is too wonderful for me" — 
is what he must be led to feeU 



INDIVIDUALITY 113 

How IS education to be invested with such 
meaning that it becomes religion? How can 
thing and fact be clothed for the child with 
reverential awe? 

The best of books for that purpose is the Bible. 
Let the child's education, the imagery of his 
mind, the words on his lips, the meanings in his 
heart, come out of his reading of the Bible, He 
finds God in other books, but here he finds Him 
supreme. It is the emphasis on God, the God- 
approach to all things, in the Bible which makes 
the Bible a dififerent thing, giving it so pecuhar 
and important a place in the child's education. 

But more than that the King James Version of 
the Bible, if not the original, is still to-day the 
best source of pure, idiomatic and simple Eng- 
lish form. 

The Bible is the humanest book in the world; 
the King James Version of it is the greatest 
book in English literature, and the very source 
and fountain-head of English literature. With- 
out the Bible, English literature is so wholly un- 
thinkable that it strikes the mind as absurd. 
And an English education without the Bible is 
quite as unthinkable — but it is far from absurd. 



114 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

It is a denial. Children nowadays go to Sunday 
school, but not with a Bible; nor do they read 
out of a Bible when they arrive. They read 
from a *' lesson leaf/' a prepared substitute. 

We are a Bible-starved Nation. There is 
positively no substitute for the King James 
Version of the Bible, nothing to take its place, 
no revised, modernized, storyized version, noth- 
ing yet devised or to be devised that will do 
at all for the old ''authorized" Bible. 

Our own children never went much to Sun- 
day school — never '^studied'' the Bible. They 
learned about the Old and New Testaments, 
the various groups of the books, the books in 
each group; they committed many psalms and 
other selections to memory; they know Who's 
Who in the Bible, and they love the Book; but 
this they got by reading. 

It is remarkable what you can get out of some 
books by reading them. We began the reading 
years ago — none of us can remember when — 
in a haphazard way (after the training I had had 
in Sunday school). This was soon changed to 
a regular, orderly way, which, starting with 
Genesis, went forward a chapter a day, until, by 



INDIVIDUALITY 115 

and by, it came to the end of Revelation. And 
the next morning we turned back and started 
in again with Genesis, which was as fresh as if 
we had not read it some two or three years 
before ! 

Each of us has his own Bible, and one of the 
boys is Bible warden. He puts them on after 
breakfast, as the old servant in the Ruskin 
household put on the dessert. Every morning, 
as soon as breakfast is over, and while we are 
still at the table (it is fatal to rise), the Bibles 
are brought in and passed around, and beginning 
at the head of table, we read aloud in turn, 
dividing the chapter by verses equally among 
us. Seven mornings a week, D.V., we do this, 
and on Sunday morning, for years, those seven 
chapters were reviewed, discussed, and illus- 
trated with a series of great Bible pictures. 
Besides this, we studied Toy's ** History of the 
Religion of Israel,'' and read a life of Christ 
which I had the temerity to write for one of our 
popular magazines when a theological student; 
we followed Paul in his wanderings; but the 
daily reading was and is the big thing — right 
along from day to day, dry places, hard places. 



ii6 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

and bad places, never missing a line — not even 
the numbering of the Tribes, the building of the 
Tabernacle, the Who-begat-Whom chapters, 
Ruth and Rahab and the Scarlet Woman : every- 
body, everything, just as it reads, without a 
quiver, and with endless joy and zest. 

If it is a 'Mry" place like the building of the 
Tabernacle, so much the better lesson in pa- 
tience and concentration; if it is a ''bad" place 
(and there are some horrid spots in the Old 
Testament), the children had better have it 
frankly with us than on the sly, and have it 
early while their only interest in it is the interest 
of fact. If it is a ''hard" place, as it was this 
morning in the fifteenth chapter of Joshua, we 
lick it up, to see who can do the cleanest job 
of pronunciation, who can best handle his 
tongue, and make most poetry out of the cities 
with their villages. 

But there are the beautiful places, the thrilling 
places — the story, the poetry, the biography, 
the warning, the exhortation, the revelation, 
the priest, the prophet, the Great Teacher, the 
Twelve Disciples, kings and common people, and 
everywhere the presence of God. 



INDIVIDUALITY 117 

I have not tried to shape the children's reli- 
gious faith, that being a natural thing without 
need of shaping, unless, distorted by dogma, it 
must be reshaped till it again becomes a little 
child's. I have learned religion of them, not 
they of me, with my graduate degree in theology, 
which I would so gladly give in exchange for 
the heart of a little child ! 



CHAPTER IV 
EDUCATION FOR AUTHORITY 
I 

LOOKING out over the 105,000,000 of 
our people, and thinking of the millions 
of American children in school, and of 
the millions of dollars annually spent in Amer- 
ica for education, one of our college presidents 
in a recent report calls his trustees' attention 
to the fact that, for all of these millions of 
money and children, American education has 
not produced for the present moment a single 
great poet, a single great philosopher, or a single 
great religious leader, his survey closing with 
these signijficant words: '*The great voices of 
the spirit are stilled just now in America." 

That the voices of the spirit in any nation, for 
any moment, should be silent is enough to give a 
people pause. That such voices should be silent 
in our Nation, and at this particular moment, is 
more than a curious comment upon American 
education: it is a very solemn, serious charge. 
Why is it that with all our means and our un- 



AUTHORITY 119 

limited material, we have not produced for this 
crisis a single great poet or philosopher or 
religious leader? 

The answer is: We don't believe in poets and 
philosophers and religious leaders. We believe 
in business men. We have no mind for the 
things of the spirit, and no course of study for 
spiritual ends. The plan and purpose of Ameri- 
can education is practical, vocational, for busi- 
ness. No American parent educates his child for 
poetry or prophecy. A business friend of mine, 
with young sons of his own, a staunch church 
goer, and a steady worker in the Y.M.C.A., 
hearing that a certain young college man had 
decided to enter the ministry, came to me the 
other day and said, with great grief: 

''What can we do to head him off?'' 

*'What do you wish to head him off for?" I 
asked. 

** Think of the waste of all that splendid 
material!" he exclaimed. 

There speaks the American — not the Ameri- 
can father only, but the typical American mother 
as well. This mind, of course, is matched with 
an education. If we look for ''Captains of 



120 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

Industry," for great inventors, organizers and 
bankers in America we shall find them. The 
great voices of the spirit are stilled just now in 
America, but not the grunt of the pig in Pitts- 
burgh or the squeal of the pig in Chicago. We 
believe in pig iron and pork. 

We Americans need a new faith and a new 
education that shall make for wisdom and ser- 
mon and song. We have the doer. Is there an 
education for the Creator? 

At the close of the Sermon on the Mount, 
the commentator says : The people were aston- 
ished, for He taught them as one having author- 
ity, and not as those who had gone to college 
(un- Authorized Version). They were astonished 
that every reference to their sacred books was 
to contradict them ; that over against their hith- 
erto unquestioned authority He should set Him- 
self in authority; that these obvious things He 
said should be so true, so astonishingly new and 
true : homely, familiar things, not out of books, 
but out of life and nature. 

Except for a faint echo of Isaiah and the 
Psalmists, and some half-dozen references to Old 
Testament law (which he cited to refute), all the 



AUTHORITY 121 

matter in the Sermon on the Mount is from 
common life and the out-of-doors : the house on 
the rock; the good tree and the evil fruit; the 
false prophet; the straight gate ; the son who asks 
a fish; the pearls before the swine; the lilies of 
the field — familiar matter, and commonplace, 
but suddenly new with meaning, and startling 
with authority. 

Isaiah had dealt earlier with these things; and 
one rises from that prophet wondering what 
more can be said, how better said. Yet Isaiah 
never spake like the Man of this Sermon. This 
Man had the books of Isaiah, but He went be- 
hind the books with his observations, as sub- 
stance goes behind shadow, appealing from the 
books direct to life and nature. 

Life and nature are still the source of origi- 
nality, the sole seat of authority. Books make a 
full man. It is life and nature that give him 
authority. But life and nature are little reckoned 
with in formal education; small credit is given 
them in the classroom ; yet authority — author- 
ship — poet and prophet, are the glory of edu- 
cation. Or is it the end of education to produce 
the scribe? 



122 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

Neither scribe nor author is the end of our 
school education; but that average intelligence 
upon which democracy rests. Not scribe but 
citizen, not author but voter, is the business of 
the schools, the true end of its course of study. 
The schools are the public's, concerned with the 
public, with the education of living together. 
There are several educations, however: one, in 
the public school, for democracy ; another, in and 
out of school, for individuality; and another 
distinct and essential education, in life and 
nature, for authority — as great a national need 
as democracy. We need peace and prosperity 
and liberty and the pursuit of happiness; but 
quite as much does this Nation need vision — to 
walk in truth and beauty. Where there is no 
vision, the people perish. 

Can we educate for vision? teach men author- 
ity — to preach a Sermon on the Mount? to land 
on Plymouth Rock? to write a Walden Pond? 
to be an Abraham Lincoln? to risk a league of 
nations? These are visions, daring, dangerous 
visions, not old out of books, but new, out of life 
and nature. We must educate for vision — for 
dreams and deeds that are without precedent. 



AUTHORITY 123 

But not in school. Jesus went little to school. 
He knew a few great books profoundly ; but He 
was not bound out to books for an education. 
It is hardly strange that the schools should make 
nothing of this. It is passing strange, however, 
that we parents, dreaming dreams for our chil- 
dren, should send them to school for their whole 
education, getting no hint from an opposite 
course that was found fit for Jesus. 

There were schools and books aplenty, and 
young Saul of Tarsus had them, and had Gama- 
liel for his teacher. The boy in Nazareth had a 
few great books of poetry and prophecy; He had 
his school, too, but it was the carpenter's shop, 
the village street, the wild, lonely hills reaching 
off behind the town. This was his education ; and 
there is none better — none other, perhaps — 
for authority. 

Supreme utterance is always poetic utterance, 
deeply human, deeply religious, and as fresh and 
daring as the dawn. Such utterance may come 
untaught. But if the conscious power for such 
utterance is the possession of the few, the in- 
stinct for it, and the joy in it, is a quality of all 
human minds. Deeper within us than pur con- 



124 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

scious mind, deeper than our subconscious mind, 
this instinct for utterance is the essence of the 
unconscious, the inmost, mind, whose substance 
is the flux of all originals. We can all utter, 
create, make ; and we should have in our educa- 
tion the raw materials out of which new things 
are made; and find somewhere the original 
patterns according to which new things are 
made. 

There were other boys in Nazareth, who had 
the books, the work-bench, the village street and 
the lonely hills, without acquiring authority. 
This single boy was different. So is every boy — 
yet no matter how different this particular boy, 
the significant thing is that He had for teachers 
the humble people, work with tools, the solemn, 
silent hills, and a few beautiful, intensely spir- 
itual books, and that out of this teaching He 
learned to speak with authority. 

So it was with Lincoln : the very books, work 
with his hands, elemental people, the lonely 
backwoods. Lincoln and Edward Everett were 
different; not so different in genius, however, as 
in education. '* Lincoln," says a biographer, 
''was a self-made man, in whom genius tri- 



AUTHORITY 125 

umphed over circumstance." I should rather 
say that of Everett, the accomplished scholar, 
Greek professor, President of Harvard College, 
Governor of Massachusetts, editor, senator, for- 
eign minister, who, in spite of all this circum- 
stance, was something of a natural orator. But 
standing beside Lincoln at Gettysburg, he spoke 
for an hour with this vast book education, like 
the Scribes, leaving Lincoln, with his natural 
education, to speak for five minutes with author- 
ity. Genius and circumstance in Lincoln were 
by chance joined together; conventional educa- 
tion happily did not put them asunder. Of these 
two, Edward Everett was emphatically the self- 
made man in whom genius triumphed over cir- 
cumstances — such triumph as there was. 

It is not often so with genius. Chance cannot 
get the consent of circumstance; nor to-day is 
there any match for convention. 

Take my little neighbor, a small Finnish boy 
in the woods of Hingham who brought into 
Boston the other day his winter's catch of furs — 
twenty-six dollars worth of skunk and mink and 
muskrat skins. He was asked to come to a select 
private school and tell the little bookish boys in 



126 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

the city of his adventures in the woods. The 
little bookish boys of Boston knew little of the 
wilds of Hingham; and the little trapper of the 
wilds knew even less of the books of Boston. 
And what a pity! If only the two courses, these 
complementary educations could some way be 
combined ! 

That little Finn boy's father was a peripatetic 
story-teller in Russia, a wandering, professional 
raconteur — until he reached America and the 
Fore River shipyard. He is a boiler- maker now. 
But the open road still calls to the boy and a 
real flute is hidden in his jacket. Rime and 
ballad are in his blood. He is being ** American- 
ized'' in the Hingham schools into a good boiler- 
maker. And the little boys in the Boston 
school will boss him at Fore River. 

Russia is an unhappy land now. But I had 
rather be a wandering Finn and a story-teller 
in Russia, than an Americanized boiler-maker 
here. Neither Lincoln nor Edward Everett 
were boiler-makers — thanks to accident, not 
to school education. I tremble to think what 
either of them would be if they were in school 
to-day! It is idle to speculate on what Lincoln 



AUTHORITY 127 

might have been, had his ancestors stayed in 
Hingham, where they landed, and had he gone 
to Derby Academy and to Harvard. It is almost 
too terrible to contemplate. Let us rather 
remember what actually happened, for what 
actually happened on the Big South Fork of 
Nolin Creek is more significant. Here he was 
born, a long way from Hingham, the son of 
a carpenter, and he had for teachers his father's 
tools, the prairie, the westering pioneers, the 
great river, the **Life of Washington," ** Pil- 
grim's Progress," iEsop, Shakespeare, and the 
Bible — the large electives that cover the 
course of natural education as against the edu- 
cation of the School. 

This is the education for authority. A child 
cannot be educated for authority on lesser 
books, with sophisticated people, with pointless 
play instead of work, with ordered lessons in 
school in place of the dear disorder of nature, 
and her companionship, and his own soul's. 
The simple needs of authorship have not 
changed. 

The trouble is too much school education and 
too little natural education. We limit education 



128 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

to the school, as if the school were a whole 
education ! 

II 

All great utterance is original, simple and pro- 
found — reaching up and down to God. The 
education of the poet and prophet must include 
God. But who looks after your child's education 
in religion? As a factor in education, religion has 
almost ceased to operate, notwithstanding the 
. church schools. The sensitive spirit cannot seek 

] f after God in school. It should have a universe — 
r 

and have it all alone. As truly as ever do we live, 

and move, and have our being in God; but at 

this present moment we have so much more of 

being in business, and move so much faster by 

motor, that it seems our existence in God must 

possibly have been prenatal, or might become 

a postmortem affair. 

Religion in education is strictly the part of 

some one — the parental part of education, and 

no business of any school. Is it because I fail, 

that I seem to see all parents failing in religion? 

My children have not had what I had in religion 

— not my Quaker grandfather certainly, who 



AUTHORITY 129 

was lame and walked slowly, and so, I used to 
think, and still think, more surely walked with 
God. My first memory of that grandfather is of 
his lifting an adder out of the winding woodpath 
with his cane, saying, ''Thee must never hurt 
one of God's creatures" — an intensely religious 
act and an intensely religious saying, which to 
this day cover for me the glittering folds of the 
snake with the care, and not the curse, of God. 

Years later I was at work in the Marine Bio- 
logical Laboratory at Woods Hole. Dr. C. O. 
Whitman was lecturing. He had traced the 
development of the cod's egg back to a single 
cell of jellied protoplasm, when he^ paused. 

** Gentlemen,'* he said, with dramatic re- 
straint, *'I can go no further. There is that in 
this cell we call life. But the microscope does 
not reveal it. We all know what it does. But 
who knows what it is? Is it a form of motion? 
The theologian calls it God. I am not a theolo- 
gian. I do not know what life is." 

He need not have been a theologian — only a 
very little child once, with his lame grandfather 
to tell him the snake is God's; and in those after 
years, coming to the end of his great lecture on 



130 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

the embryology of the cod's egg, and to the 
greater mystery in that cell of living protoplasm, 
he would have spoken with authority. 

It is not every child whose sleep is as light as 
little Samuel's, whose dreams are stirred by 
strange voices as were Joan of Arc's; but there 
are many more such children than there are 
parents like Hannah, or priests like Eli, to tell 
them that it is the voice of God. 

The crimson was fading into cold October 
gray as I came upon him — twelve years old, 
and just an ordinary boy, his garden fork under 
the hill of potatoes he had started to dig, his 
face upturned, his eyes following far off the 
flight of a wild duck across the sky. 

**He who from zone to zone" 
I began, more to myself than to him. 

"Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight" 

he went on, as much to himself as to me. 

''Father," he added reflectively, as the bird 
disappeared down the dusky slope of the sky, 
*'Vm glad I know that piece." 

''Why?" I asked. 



AUTHORITY 131 

''I see so much more when the wild ducks fly 
over." 

"How much more do you see?" 

''I see the wild ducks and God flying over 
together." 

And is he a poet who sees less? Beauty and 
truth that do not reach religion do not reach the 
human heart. An education that lacks religion 
must lack authority, because it cannot know who 
made the flat-headed adder, who flies with the 
wild duck, who works in the cod's egg, to will 
and to do. Religion is the consciousness of the 
universe — that it is infinite, eternal, and that 
it is all God's! 

Ill 

The realm of art, the Kingdom of Heaven, and 
the life of this dear earth admit only little chil- 
dren. Great utterance is universal utterance, 
simple, elemental. 

Henry Adams, in the course of his "Educa- 
tion," had come up from the South Seas to 
Paris with John La Farge. "At the galleries and 
exhibitions he was shocked," so he says, "by 
the effort of art to be original; and when, one 



132 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

day, after much reflection, John La Farge asked 
whether there might not still be room for some- 
thing simple in art, Adams shook his head. As 
he saw the world, it was no longer simple and 
could not express itself simply. It should ex- 
press what it was, and this was something that 
neither Adams nor La Farge understood." 

The world is not simple; nor the cell of the 
cod's eggy either. The forces of cleavage are in 
that cell, the whole fearful fish is there, and 
future oceans of fish besides, all in that pellucid 
drop of protoplasm. Society never was, never 
can be, simple. It cannot be educated for au- 
thority, but only to know and accept authority. 

But it was precisely this sophisticated world 
that Adams did understand, and not simple men 
and women. Adams was not born a babe into 
life, but an Adams into Boston, with (to quote 
him) ''the First Church, the Boston State House, 
Beacon Hill, John Hancock and John Adams, 
Mount Vernon Street, and Quincy all crowding 
on [his] ten pounds of babyhood.'' And the 
trouble with Henry Adams was that he never 
got from under. 

Jesus was more fortunate. He was born in a 



AUTHORITY 133 

stable. Lincoln had the luck of a log cabin on 
the Big South Fork of NoHn Creek, as had Cyrus 
Dallin, the sculptor, only his cabin stood within 
a stockade in wild, unsettled Utah. Boston has 
found room for Dallin's ** Appeal to the Great 
Spirit,*' as the world has found ample room for 
the *' Gettysburg Address" — simple, elemental 
things of art that shall never want for room. 
*' Art,*' says Whistler, ^'is limited to the infinite, 
and beginning there, cannot progress. The 
painter has but the same pencil — the sculptor 
the chisel of centuries.*' 

Chisel and mallet are elemental. There can be 
no simpler cutting tool than a chisel, the thing 
Phidias used; the only thing Rodin requires. 
Chaucer and Shakespeare, and even Spenser, 
got on without typewriters — harmless things, 
possibly, but unnecessary for poetry and 
prophecy. 

A poet is still-born in Boston every day — 
killed by toys in place of the tools that make 
them; by books in place of the life they tell of; 
by schools, museums, theaters, and stores, 
where things are pieced and ordered, filmed, col- 
lected, canned, and labeled, in place of a whole 



134 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

world of whole things, until the little poet asks 
me, as one did the other day, ''What does cream 
come from?" — a sterilized concoction in a 
bottle, brought by the grocer, his nearest ap- 
proach to a cow and a milking-stool ! Yet he was 
to have written of 

"Wrinkled skin on scalded milk!" 

The educating process is started wrong, and 
started too early. It is started with books when 
it ought to start with things, with study when it 
should be started with work. 

Watch a child at mud-pies or building a dam. 
Such intense application, such concentrated 
effort, such complete abandon! Play? The 
sweat on that little face, the tongue tight be- 
tween the teeth, the utter unconsciousness of 
burning sun and cooling dinner, are the very 
signs of divine creative work. 

Every son of God, if not a world to create, 
needs an earth to subdue. But instead of allow- 
ing him to work, we teach him to be amused, as if 
his proper frame were passive, his natural action 
irresponsible; as if he must be kept busy at 
winding things up and watching them run down. 



AUTHORITY 135 

I say it IS started too early — if it starts in a 
kindergarten. In a nation of poets and prophets 
there will be no kindergarten. A kindergarten 
is an institution for the poor. It is a substitute, 
and a poor one, for the home. It is an educa- 
tional orphanage, the educational wet-nurse and 
weaning institute for abdicating parents. It 
starts the child's institutional life and socializing 
processes all too early; over-restraining, over- 
directing, over-training the social at the ex- 
pense of the original in him, surrounding him too 
early with the highly complex and refined in 
place of the simple, the elemental and the raw. 
It is easier for the camel to get through the 
needle's eye and for the rich man to get through 
the gate of Heaven than for a poet to get 
through a kindergarten alive. 

We have not the courage of our convictions — 
if indeed we have educational convictions! No 
father, asked for bread, would give a stone; but 
when asked for truth and beauty and reality, 
how few of us have the courage to give a son 
what Jesus had, or Lincoln had, or the two years 
before the mast that young Richard Henry 
Dana had ! 



136 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

Quitting his cultured home, his sophisticated 
college, his conventional city, Dana escaped by 
way of the old, uncultured sea, with men as un- 
cultured. He had plum-duflf on Sundays. *'Two 
Years Before the Mast *' tells the story of that 
escape from scribbling into living, from a state 
of mind like Boston, out and down around the 
Horn. 

To save the poet and prophet now standard- 
ized to scribes, shall we do away with schools? 
I have known too many free-verse poets, too 
many fool prophets, to say that. Genius is 
unique; it is also erratic, and needs to toe the 
mark in school. The training for expression is 
more than wandering lonely as a cloud. There 
is much for the poet in trigonometry, and in 
English grammar. He must go to school to meet 
his fellows, too, and his teachers — but not until 
he is able both to listen to the doctors and to ask 
them questions. 

Education for authority must both precede 
and continue with conventional education ; equal 
place made for chores, great books, simple peo- 
ple, and the out-of-doors, with that which is 
made for texts, and recitations, and school-room 



AUTHORITY 137 

drill; parents sharing equally with professional 
teachers in the whole process, unless we utterly 
nationalize our children. 

Two of my children are in a Boston high 
school, having five hours of Latin, five of Ger- 
man, five of French, three of English, three of 
mathematics, three of history, two of military 
drill — twenty-six hours in all. And they call 
it education! That is not education. That is 
getting ready for college — which is not to be 
confused with education. It fits for college, not 
for authority; it is almost certain death to 
originality and the creative faculty. 

There must be a course of study in school and 
college, and it must be shaped to some end. Is it, 
however, the right end of four years in high 
school, to get to college? or the right end of four 
years in college, to get into a job? There is a 
certain Spartan virtue in this high-school study, 
something that makes for push and power, but 
nothing of preparation for great utterance in 
sermon or song. 

One of my boys came home from high school 
recently and said : 

'* Father, Tve been elected to an office." 



138 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

"Well," said I, "what office?" 

"IVe been elected secretary to the debating 
society." 

"Oh," I answered, "I wouldn't crow over 
that! I thought you might have been elected 
president or poet of your class." 

"You don't seem to understand, father." 

"What don't I understand?" I asked. 

"You don't seem to understand there are 
twenty-eight members in that debating so- 
ciety—" 

"Twenty-eight! Why, it's worse than I 
thought! Twenty-eight in your debating so- 
ciety and twenty-six hundred boys in your 
school? I would n't tell anybody else about my 
office." 

"But you don't let me explain, father." 

"Explain what?" I replied. 

"That there are twenty-eight members in 
that society: twenty-six Jews, and two Gentiles 
— * Honey' [his younger brother] and myself." 

"Do you mean to tell me you got an office, 
single-handed, away from twenty-six Jews?" 
I cried. "Here, give me your hand! It's the 
greatest thing you ever did!" 



AUTHORITY 139 

I say that high-school course makes for push 
and power. This boy is learning some very 
necessary things — how to handle those twenty- 
six Jews — how to commend himself to them for 
their votes ; learn what is commendable in them 
— for they and he are future Boston. There is 
no other school that I know, certainly no private 
school, where this necessary lesson can be 
learned. Yet this whole course of study makes 
but little for poetry and prophecy. 

The children do not know that the poet in 
them is being killed. I know — but I only half 
believe the poet to be in them ! 

The sin of the fathers — this fear of the 
divine fire! Mine are ordinary children. I 
should have adopted them, foundlings of un- 
known, elfin parentage. Then I had believed, 
and had given them to Merlin, as Arthur was 
given, or to the Lord, as Hannah gave little 
Samuel. 

I did have them born and brought up in the 
hills of Hingham, forced out of the city when 
the second one came. I gave them the farm, the 
woods, the great books, the simple people, and 
religion, but timidly — allowing them at this 



140 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

day to take fifteen hours of study in foreign lan- 
guages to three meager hours in their glorious 
native tongue. And these are to be poets and 
prophets ! 

Then they must needs speak in German, 
French, and Latin. English is a foreign tongue 
in the Boston high schools. John Gower did his 
*'Confessio Amantis'' in three languages, but 
Geoffrey Chaucer found it a life's task to con- 
quer his native English, sighing: 

*'The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." 

Poets have scarcely time to learn their own 
language. If any of them are going through 
American high schools, they will learn a few 
French irregular verbs, know that Weib is 
neuter, and how Ama is conjugated, but they 
will not know the parts of the verbs ''lay'* 
and **lie,'' and their vocabulary of adjectives 
will be limited to **some" and ** dandy*' or to 
*' some-dandy." 

A young nephew was visiting us not long ago, 
a graduate of one of the best high schools and 
one of the best colleges in the land. He had 
finished his law course, too. We sat down to one 



AUTHORITY 141 

of his aunt's famous chicken dinners. He was 
enjoying the moment immensely and exclaimed, 
**This is some-dandy chicken dinner, aunty!" 

I took him to drive out on Jerusalem Road, 
showing him Minot's Light and the ships going 
over the hills of the sea. He had never seen salt 
water before and was deeply impressed. By and 
by he said to me, still gazing rapt across the 
sea, "This is some-dandy sight, Uncle Dallas." 

We swung around through Cohasset back 
toward home when something went wrong with 
the Ford. I got out to tinker with the insides of 
the thing when the young man, with a twinkle 
in his eye, declared, '*You have some-dandy 
limousine here, uncle." 

We got home. He was sitting with his aunt 
talking of things back West at home. 

'*Do you remember Charlie Jones, aunty?" 
he asked. *'Did you know he had died? No? 
Yes, he's gone. He was my dearest friend. I 
never had an experience that more nearly broke 
me up than that, aunty." Then, after a mo- 
ment's pause, he went on with great feeling and 
solemnity, '' But I '11 tell you, aunty, we did give 
him some-dandy funeral." 



142 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

All the way from a chicken fricassee to a 
funeral he had this same hyphenated bastard of 
an adjective with which to express his emotions. 
The consequence was he had the same emotion 
all the time. He did not know whether he was 
eating a chicken dinner or going to a funeral. 

Is this the education for poetry and prophecy, 
or for those who plead before twelve good men 
and true? 

'*We don't need to study English, we inherit 
it," one of my college men said to me. 

''How much did you inherit?" I asked; and 
as a test turned to Whittier's ** Snow-Bound, " 
which lay on my lecture-room desk, and read to 
him — 

" Meanwhile we did our nightly chores 
Brought in the wood from out of doors" 

— and the ten lines that follow, finding eight 
words — ''littered," "mows,*' "walnut bows," 
"herd's-grass," "stanchion," "chores," "queru- 
lous," and ' ' birch ' ' — that were foreign to him and 
to the majority of the class — without meaning, 
and so without image and poetry. It chanced that 
I was wearing a brown Windsor tie, and I saw one 



AUTHORITY 143 

student nudge another and whisper, ''The cows 
had 'walnut bows' on like the professor's." 

Rubbing it in a little, I declared that I could 
open any English book, and on any page find a 
word that none of them had ever used, and that 
most of them would not even understand. On 
my desk lay a small wrapped book from some 
publisher. I cut the string and found I had a 
supplementary reader for eighth grade school 
children, and opening it in the middle, took the 
middle paragraph on the page, and began to 
read: 

"The ragged copses on the horizon showed the 
effect of the severe shelling'* — a war-story, re- 
printed from the "Youth's Companion"! 

"Copses," I said to the young man who had 
inherited the English language; "what does 
'ragged copses' mean?" 

He took one profound look into his heritage — 
in the region of his diaphragm — then cast his 
eyes slowly around the horizon of the room, and 
answered, that he did n't know what the ragged 
policemen were doing there in No Man's Land ! 

I turned to a young woman student. "What 
does 'ragged copses' mean?" I asked. 



144 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

She raised her hands to her face, shivered 
cruelly, and replied that she just hated such 
horrid words — she just hated to think of that 
battle-field all strewn with ghastly tattered 
corpses! 

And what shall be said of another college man, 
reporter on the ''Boston Globe," whose chief 
told me of sending him to get a story about a 
little bay colt that was prancing gayly up News- 
paper Row. Turning at the office door, the re- 
porter asked doubtfully, "You said a hay colt — 
Is that some kind of sea-horse?" 

*'Who said sea-horse?" snorted the editor. 
" I said a bay colt out on the street." 

'*Is that a new breed of horse?" 

"Breed?" roared the editor. ''Breed? I said 
a bay colt — a color, not a breed!" 

"Oh, come now," said the undone reporter, 
"don't jolly me. There is n't any such color in 
the rainbow." 

"Nor among neckties either," added the 
editor; "but there is among hprses, as any farm- 
boy knows." 

What any farm-boy knows is the beginning of 
the knowledge and the foundation of the vocabu- 



AUTHORITY 145 

lary of authority. The farm-boy's elemental, 
but amazingly varied, word-horde is the very 
form of universal speech. Poets and prophets 
have always used his simple words; and poets 
and prophets must ever live as he lives, and 
learn what he has learned of language and 
things. 

IV 

All great utterance is not only religious and 
simple, it is original. And somewhere in the 
course of the child's education, he must be given 
the raw materials, I say, out of which original 
things are made; and the original patterns ac- 
cording to which they are made. But this can- 
not be done in any school. 

God speaks to the man, not to the multitude 
— to Moses on the Mount, not to the people 
huddled in the plain. Society commissions, but 
the individual finds the truth, reveals the beauty. 

We know that scribes get together in schools, 
but we forget that creators work "each in his 
separate star," as lonely as God; and that the 
education of the creator is strictly in the hands 
of those strictly responsible for him. The re- 



146 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

sponsibility of professional teachers is for chil- 
dren. They must think children, in terms of men 
and women ; and must educate them for society. 
We parents must think the child, must educate 
the child, not for society, but for himself — for 
authority. The teachers, looking upon their 
pupils, see the people, equal before the law, 
sharing alike the privileges, shouldering alike the 
responsibilities — one another's keepers, upon 
whose intelligence and right spirit the Nation 
rests. Thus, as teachers, do they see their chil- 
dren and their educational duty. 

As a parent, I must see my child as foreor- 
dained from the foundation of the world; and 
looking upon him, I must cry, ''Unto us a child 
is born, unto us a son is given, and the govern- 
ment shall be upon his shoulders; and his name 
shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor — or poet, 
or prophet, for he shall have authority." So, as 
a parent, I must think of my child and of my 
educational duty. 

God's work is not done; and mine may be the 
son called from the beginning, to complete in 
line, or color, or word, or deed, the divine thing 
God started but could not finish. For God is not 



AUTHORITY 147 

complete until he is made flesh, and dwells 
among us. 

There is no school that can provide for this 
Only Son. School education is social — it is for 
all; for life together; how to even and average 
life's extremes. The private school for the bril- 
liant mind is pure sophistry, and simon-pure 
snobbery. Averaging, of course, is a process 
down, as well as up, to a common level — a 
social level. Democracy is that common social 
level. Education in a democracy must average 
— teach the high to come down, the humble to 
rise, and all of us to walk together. Not trying 
to do more than this for any, nor daring to do 
less than this for all, it must hinder no mind 
either by merging individuality, or by setting up 
a material well-being for the better values of the 
spirit. 

The level of education has risen lately in the 
public schools; university standards meanwhile 
have distinctly deteriorated — have sought the 
average. *' College education is now aimed to 
qualify the student, not to give him quality." 
The college has become a business institution; 
even the college of liberal arts is now a pre- 



148 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

pedagogical, pre-medical, pre-legal, or some 
other pre-practical vocational school. 

Students still come to college to serve, come 
seeing visions, too, being young — but visions of 
business. In the multitude of twenty college 
classes passing through my lecture-room I know 
of but one student to finish his course, bent as he 
was born, to poetry. He is now spinning a Ph.D. 
cocoon for himself, the poet about to emerge a 
college professor! 

This is not the fault of youth. Trailing clouds 
of glory do they come from God who was their 
home. But they land in America for business. 
And in such numbers! 

I believe in numbers, in business. I freely 
trust the work of the State with this safe, sane 
average — but it was none of them who wrote 
the Declaration of Independence, the Proclama- 
tion of Emancipation, or the Covenant of the 
League of Nations. 

The poet cannot be the direct product of the 
schools. His education is more out of things 
than books, more out of solitude than society, 
more out of nature than schools. The author is 
single, original, free; he uses raw materials, ele- 



AUTHORITY 149 

ments, earths that are without form and void. 
In him is the pattern of all new worlds. His life 
is to shape them, and give them suns and stars. 
But in place of raw materials, the unattempted 
yet in prose or rhyme, we give him only the 
graded systems of the schools, which make for 
many essential things, but which may be more 
deadly to his creative faculty than anything the 
headlong angels fell on in Hell. For they had, at 
least, 

"The dark, unfathomed, infinite abyss," 

through whose obscure one of them must find his 
uncouth way; whereas our unf alien children are 
run into the school machine at five, and earlier, 
as oranges into a sorter, the little ones dropping 
out through their proper hole into shop or ojffice, 
the bigger ones rolling on until they tumble into 
college. 

Human nature is unique, and not to be han- 
dled by machine. It is active, a doing nature, 
fit for unfinished earth, not heaven, the earth- 
partner, and co-creator in God's slowly shaping 
world. Send human nature to school? But if 
school can make them, why are we without ''a 



150 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

great poet, a great philosopher, a great religious 
leader"? Why is it that '*the great voices of the 
spirit are stilled just now"? It is because educa- 
tion is too far removed from the simple, the 
original — from life and nature. 

"And Nature, the old nurse, took 
The child upon her knee, 
Saying, * Here is a story book, 
Thy father has written for thee.' " 

That was the first story-book. It still remains 
the greatest of source-books. Here the human 
story begins; against this background the plot 
unfolds; and here ends. Here is written that 
older tale of Limidus polyphemus, the horseshoe 
crab, and that ancienter story of the stars. Into 
the Book of Nature are bound all the '* Manu- 
scripts of God" — the originals of all authors, 
whether they create in words, or notes, or colors, 
or curves ; the originals of the past, of the present, 
and that longer, richer future. 

***Come wander with me,* she said, 
*Into regions yet untrod; 
And read what is still unread 
In the manuscripts of God!*** 

Mother of us all. Nature should be the teacher 
of all, lest she be denied that chosen one to 



AUTHORITY 151 ' 

whom she would give authority. It is she who 
shall show him how, '*in the citron wing of the 
pale butterfly with its dainty spots of orange," 
he shall see *'the stately halls of fair gold, with 
their slender saffron pillars" ; and ** how the deli- 
cate drawing high upon the walls shall be traced 
in tender tones of orpiment, and repeated by the 
base in notes of graver hue." 

But these things are written in books, and 
hung in galleries, and can be taught more quickly 
there? They cannot be taught at all there. 
Nature keeps no school. She teaches her pupils 
singly, revealing to each what is for him alone. 
He can learn many things in school, but not 
authority — not how to paint Whistler's 
** Mother," or how to write Wordsworth's 
''Stepping Westward," or how to cut a single 
marble of the Parthenon. 

** By what authority doest thou these things? " 
The poet answers: '* Nature is my authority, 

*And that auxiHar light 
Which on the setting sun bestows new splendor.' " 

Yet the schools overflow, as if authority were 
there! Students come to paint and to play, 
before they learn to see and hear; they come to 



152 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

write, before experience has given them any- 
thing to say. They must come to school, the 
prophet from the wilderness, the poet from the 
fields and hills, when twice ten summers have 
stamped their minds forever with 

"The faces of the moving year/* 

The first Monday of September, Labor is on 
parade. The Tuesday after, and the school-chil- 
dren of America are on the march — a greater 
host than Labor's, as its work is greater. This is 
the vastest thing we Americans do, this mighty 
making of the democratic mind — the average 
mind. But it is not a poetic-prophetic mind we 
are making — not educated for authority. 

Too, too few of all this marching multitude 
are coming to their little books well read in the 
Book of Nature ; and to their little teachers from 
earlier, elemental lessons with the thoughtful 
hills, with the winds, and the watchful stars. 

** Earth and the common face of nature*' 
have not spoken to them 

" rememberable things." 

This is not for the schools to do ; this is beyond 
the schools to do; and besides, it is then too late; 



AUTHORITY 153 

for Derwent, or some other winding stream, 
should murmur to the poet-babe while still in 
arms, and give him 

"Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind, 
A foretaste, a dim earnest of the calm 
That Nature breathes among the hills and groves." 

We Americans do not give beauty and joy to 
our children. We are not a happy-hearted, 
imaginative people. It is the foreign children 
who steal the flowers from our parks; who dance 
to the hurdy-gurdy; who haunt our picture 
galleries — little lovers of warmth and tone and 
color ! 

Every worker bee in the hive might have been 
a queen, had not the pitiless economy of the 
colony cramped her growing body into a worker 
cell, till, pinched and perverted, she takes her 
place in the fearful communism of the tribe, an 
unsexed thing, the normal mother in her starved 
into an abnormal worker, her very ovipositor 
turned from its natural use into a poison-tipped 
sting. 

Theoretically, we are not communistic, but in 
industry and education we have put the worker- 
cell theory into operation, cramping the growing 



154 EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

child into practically a uniform vocational sys- 
tem, intellectually overfeeding, and spiritually 
underfeeding the creator in him into a worker — 
a money-maker. 

Some fathers of us, more mothers, perhaps, 
might ask prophets and poets of the Lord ; but 
who of us would have the courage to educate 
such children for poetry and prophecy? 



THE END 



